Slides from Solaris Summit available

I found out about the Solaris Summit too late to be able to attend, but the slides are now on line.

Multicore application programming: sample chapter

No sign of the actual books yet - I expect to see them any day now - but there's a sample chapter up on the informit site. There's also a pdf version which includes preface and table of contents.

This is chapter 3 "Identifying opportunities for parallelism". These range from the various OS-level approaches, through virtualisation, and into multithread/multiprocess. It's this flexibility that makes multicore processors so appealing. You have the choice of whether you take advantage of them through some consolidation of existing applications, or whether you take advantage of them, as a developer, through scaling a single application.

mtmalloc performance

A while back I discussed how the performance of mtmalloc could be improved. Well Rick Weisner was working on this, so I provided him with a fix for my hot issue. So I'm very pleased to see, from the bug status, that this code was integrated last month!

Memory ordering

Just had a couple of white papers published on memory ordering. This is a topic which is quite hard to find documentation on, and also quite complex. Fortunately, it's also rarely encountered.

In Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2 we introduced the file mbarrier.h. This defines some intrinsics which allow the developer to enforce memory ordering.

The first paper covers avoiding the reordering of memory operations that the compiler may perform when compiling an application. The second paper covers the more complex issue of avoiding the reordering of memory operations that the processor may do at runtime.

Updated location

Just heard that my talk is moving to the Nikko Ballroom I. Still at 4pm Monday.

Details for Oracle Open World Presentation

I'm presenting at the Develop conference in San Francisco next week. I'll be in the Nikko Ballroom I at the Hotel Nikko, at 4pm on Monday. The title of the talk is "Multicore Application Programming with Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2". The abstract is:

Writing correct and fast parallel applications is often considered a hard problem. However, it doesn't need to be that way. This session will describe how Oracle Solaris Studio can be used to produce applications that are both fast and correct. The talk will cover parallelization strategies, implementation details, and common pitfalls, as well as describing how the tools provided by Oracle Solaris Studio can identify coding errors and performance opportunities in the application.

There's three talks from the Studio team, details are:

Date	Details	Location
Monday 20th 4:00pm	S317573: Multicore Application Programming with Oracle Solaris Studio Darryl Gove	Hotel Nikko, Nikko Ballroom I
Tuesday 21st 11:30am	S317590: Performance Measurement with Oracle Solaris Studio Performance Tools Marty Itzkowitz	Hotel Nikko, Peninsula
Wednesday 22nd 1:00pm	S317585: Building High-Quality C/C++ Applications Don Kretsch	Hotel Nikko, Nikko Ballroom II

There appears to be no way to link directly to the talk details, but they are available if you search the entire programme.

Book update

I've just handed over the final set of edits to the manuscript. These are edits to the laid-out pages. Some are those last few grammatical errors you only catch after reading a sentence twenty times. Others are tweaks to the figures. There's still a fair amount of production work to do, but my final input will be a review of the indexing - probably next week.

So it's probably a good time to talk about the cover. This is a picture that my wife took last year. It's a picture of the globe at the cliff tops at Durlston Head near Swanage in England. It's 40 tonnes and over 100 years old. It's also surrounded by stone tablets some containing contemporary educational information, and a couple of blank ones that are there just so people can draw on them.