Game engine development company Valve has a nice presentation up on their website about how they attacked multithreading. It is a nice example of how to solve multicore programming for a particular domain by the classic layered approach.
Monthly Archives: October 2007
Off-Topic: Vista Refuses Aero for Java
Vista just gave me an interesting error message: running a serious Java program required it to turn off the Aero interface. Interesting. What can Java have done to deserve that?
Off-Topic: Fun Error Message
I just got a funny error message from YouTube. Searching for quite innocuous terms like “Ã…nglok” a highly trained group of Monkeys kept popping up. Read on for screen dump.
Parallel Processing Requires Parallel IO
One common use-case for multicore processing on the desktop and elsewhere is “doing many things at the same time”. You could be running many user-interface programs at once, like the “typical today’s teenager template” of tens of IM clients, web sessions, email conversations, music and video players, downloading movies, etc. Or it is a more business-like background indexing of harddrives, backups being taken, downloading large business files, compiling software, updating source code repositories, etc.
I have been doing both of these modes to some extent, and the main problem with them at least on a PC is that while the processors might be good at multitasking and sharing the CPU load, my IO system is annoyingly non-parallel.
Hardware Debug Support & LinuxLink PodCast
The TimeSys Embedded Linux Podcast (also called LinuxLink Radio) is a nice listen about embedded computing using Linux. Sometimes they are a bit too open-source centric, though, and ignore very good tools that live in the classic commercial world. One such example is the recent episode 20 on debugging tools, where they totally ignore modern high-powered hardware-based debugging.
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