Thinking Parallel

This blog is old – just like the picture of me on the left. I created thinkingparallel.com when I did my PhD-thesis almost 20 years ago and I am keeping it online for nostalgic reasons. I will not update it anymore – and have in fact not updated it for a long time. If you […]

I usually don’t post press releases. But this one is different, since my favorite parallel programming system has almost reached its third major release. That’s right, OpenMP 3.0 is right around the corner and this is your chance to get your early fix. The language committee has worked very hard to make it a true […]

I have been very quiet on this blog lately, mostly because my new job and the creation of our new house have kept me rather busy. Having to get up at 6 in the morning to be able to bring our son to kindergarden has not helped my productivity in the evenings either – and […]

While at the Parco-Conference two weeks ago, I had the pleasure to meet Ruud van der Pas again. He is a Senior Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems and gave a very enlightening talk called Getting OpenMP Up To Speed. What I would like to post about is not the talk itself (although it contains some […]

The very first step in every successful parallelization effort is always the same: you take a look at the problem that needs to be solved and start splitting it into tasks that can be computed in parallel. This sounds easy, but I can see from my students reactions that at least for some of them […]

It has been a while since I have done this little experiment, but I still find the results interesting. As some of you may know, I teach a class on parallel programming (this is an undergraduate class, by the way – may I have a million dollar in funding now as well, please? 😎 ). […]

Anwar Ghuloum has posted his opinion about What Makes Parallel Programming Hard at the Intel Research Blogs (which are buzzing with activity with regards to parallel programming at the moment). The funny thing is, I have asked myself the same question last week, because I have just written a section in my PhD.-thesis about it. […]

I see this mistake quite often: people have a performance or scalability problem with their threaded code and start blaming locks. Because everyone knows that locks are slow and limit scalability (yes, that was ironic :grin:). They start to optimize their code by getting rid of the locks entirely, e.g. by messing around with memory […]

I have been quite late with my post this week, I apologize for that, but I have been sick with a cold (and I still am). Couple that with the fact that I did not find the time to write one or two posts in advance since Iwomp and you see why I am late […]

It’s been a short while since I came back from IWOMP but I would still like to share some of the news and experiences I have brought back from there. It’s been a really great experience for me, both at the conference and in the city of Beijing – which is always worth a trip, […]