How are you taking advantage of Multicore?

Question

As someone in the world of HPC who came from the world of enterprise web development, I\'m always curious to see how developers back in the \"real world\" are taking advanta

Answer 1

Our domain logic is based heavily on a workflow engine and each workflow instance runs off the ThreadPool.

That's good enough for us.

Answer 2

1. How does this affect your software roadmap?
   It doesn't. Our (as with almost all other) business related apps run perfectly well on a single core. So long as adding more cores doesn't significantly reduce the performance of single threaded apps, we're happy

2. ...real stories...
   Like everyone else, parallel builds are the main benefit we get. The Visual Studio 2008 C# compiler doesn't seem to use more than one core though, which really sucks

3. What are you doing with your existing code to take advantage of multicore machines
   We may look into using the .NET parallel extensions if we ever have a long-running algorithm that can be parallelized, but the odds of this actually occurring are slim. The most likely answer is that some of the developers will play around with it for interest's sake, but not much else

4. how will you deal with hundreds or thousands of cores?
   Head -> Sand.

5. If your domain doesn't easily benefit from parallel computation, then explaining why is interesting, too.
   The client app mostly pushes data around, the server app mostly relies on SQL server to do the heavy lifting

Answer 3

Learning a functional programming language might use multiple cores... costly.

I think it's not really hard to use extra cores. There are some trivialities as web apps that does not need to have any extra care as the web server does its work running the queries in parallel. The questions are for long running algorythms (long is what you call long). These need to be split over smaller domains that does not depend each other, or synchronize the dependencies. A lot of algs can do this, but sometimes horribly different implementations needed (costs again).

So, no silver bullet until you are using imperative programming languages, sorry. Either you need skilled programmers (costly) or you need to turn to an other programming language (costly). Or you may have luck simply (web).

Answer 4

I'm developing ASP.NET web applications. There is little possibility to use multicore directly in my code, however IIS already scales well for multiple cores/CPU's by spawning multiple worker threads/processes when under load.