Join Josh and Steve as they demonstrate how to use the new .NET4 Countdown event synchronization primitive in task coordination scenarios.
Countdown and related constructs are new with .NET4 and Visual Studio 2010.
Learn more about the System.Collections.Concurrent namespace and keep abreast of Parallel Computing tools and techniques via the Concurrency Dev Center.
This is a very special episode of Expert to Expert. We were very fortunate to get some time with renowned computer scientist and Microsoft Technical Fellow Butler Lampson. Butler’s impact on general purpose computing is profound. Personal computing as it exists today is in part the result of the great work done by Butler over the past 30 years.
Programming language designer and high priest of the lamda calculus Erik Meijer hosts this episode of E2E and Erik and Butler cover a very wide swath of computing topics. It’s simply beautiful and very deep geekiness. In fact, this is one of my favorite Channel 9 conversations of late. I know you will enjoy both the usual real conversational aspect of this and the depth of historical insight into some of the core aspects and unresolved problems of general purpose personal computing.
Go get some popcorn, stream this into your XBox or Media Center and learn from one of our industry’s pioneers who still has a great deal to offer to the world of personal computing. What’s Butler working on these days, you wonder? What’s top of mind for him as it relates to today’s biggest challenges in computing? What does software security really mean? How many levels of software abstraction do we need? Why is data synchronization such a hard problem? What is software embodiment, exactly (Butler will be presenting his thinking on software embodiment at PDC09, as part of the new Technical Leaders track (something yours truly is responsible for – I hope you plan on attending these very special sessions and if not you will be able to watch them right here on Channel 9))?
Tune in and meet a true legend in our industry. Microsoft is very forunate to have Butler Lampson thinking about some of the hardest problems we face as an industry and ensuring that Microsoft is capable of tackling these challenges in a way that extends the solutions for long term relevance in a changing and unpredictable environment.
You’ve learned about many of the new features of the latest version of the Windows kernel in the Mark Russinovich Inside Windows 7 conversation here on Channel 9. One of Mark’s favorite kernel innovations is the way the Windows 7 kernel manages scheduling of threads and the underlying synchronization primitives that embody kernel thread management.
Prior to Windows 7 (and therefore Windows Server 2008 R2) the Windows kernel dispatcher employed a single lock, the dispatcher lock, which worked well for a relatively small numbers of processors (like 64). However, now that we find ourselves in the midst of the ManyCore era, well, 64 processors aren’t that many… A new strategy was required to scale Windows to large numbers of processors since a single lock is limited in capability, by design: The masterful David Cutler, one of the world’s greatest software engineers, wrote the NT scheduler in a time when the notion of affordable 256-processor machines was more science fiction than probable.
As we learned in the Mark Russinovich video, Windows 7 can now scale to 256 processors thanks to the great engineering of Arun Kishan, a kernel architect you’ve met on C9 back in the Vista days. In order to promote further scalability of the NT kernel, Arun completely eliminated the dispatcher lock and replaced it with a much finer grained set of synchronization primitives. Gone are the days of contention for a single spinlock. How did Arun pull this off, exactly, you ask? Who is this genius? Well, tune in. Lots of answers await…
Arun’s work directly benefits the overall performance of Windows running on many processors and means, simply, Windows can now really scale. Thank you, Arun!
Spinlocks are synchronization primitives that cause a processor to busy-wait until the state of the lock’s memory location changes.
As the name implies, the dispatcher lock is the fundamental lock associated with the kernel dispatcher, or the scheduler.
in reply to Arun Kishan: Inside Windows 7 – Farewell to the Windows Kernel Dispatcher Lock