nwcpp.org

February 15th, 2012: Expressing Parallel Patterns in Modern C++ — Rahul V. Patil

Come at 6:30pm for pizza supplied by Amazon Digital.

The Northwest C++ Users Group is pleased to welcome Rahul V. Patil as our speaker this month. Amazon Digital is sponsoring our pizza for the meeting as well. Please join us for this meeting back in our regular room, at our regular time!

Abstract

We’ll do a lap around the most commonly applicable parallel patterns. The goal of the talk is to map each of these parallel patterns to equivalent C++ code, while taking advantage of the modern constructs in the language. We’ll demonstrate this by looking at the Parallel Patterns Library available in Visual Studio and Intel’s TBB. We’ll also look at some tools within Intel’s Parallel Studio and Microsoft’s Visual Studio that help identify, debug and analyze parallel programs.

This talk is for you, if you are looking to learn generally accepted parallel patterns and start using them in your C++ code. The talk will scale between 200 level and 400 level.

Note: The talk will not discuss C++ AMP, which deserves a full hour of its own.

Speaker Bio

Rahul V. Patil is a Lead Program Manager, in Microsoft’s C++ Parallel Computing team. He started at Microsoft 8 years ago and has been a part of the C++ concurrency runtime team since its inception.

About Rahul’s team: Parallel Computing team was founded 5 years ago with the mission of bringing programming models and tools to developers, so they may take advantage of the multi-cores and GPUs on the machine.

• Microsoft MSDN concurrency
• C++ PPL and AMP blog

Video and Slides

Watch the video of Rahul's talk or read the slides.

November 16th, 2011: Introduction to Scientific Computing — Robert Goddard

Come at 6:30pm for pizza supplied by Kongsberg Underwater Technology.

Computing in science and engineering involves modeling part of the physical world. The inputs could be detailed measurements of the environment, or a randomized set of potential measurements that might characterize some environment in the future. The outputs could be images, or sound, or predictions of whether a system will succeed or fail to perform its function, or actions to make it more (or less) likely that some system will succeed. The algorithms might involve solving a set of differential equations, or integrating some function over a multi-dimensional domain, or searching multi-dimensional parameter spaces to optimize some measure of quality or fit, or sifting through noise to find a buried signal. Speed requirements might be real-time (hard or soft), or much faster, or jus:t fast enough to fit into your project cost and schedule. The answers must be accurate enough to accomplish the mission: Personnel training, or performance prediction, or advance of scientific knowledge, or control of a system or device, or life, or death.

Scientific computing typically involves a whole lot of arithmetic. So, I will begin with a review of floating point arithmetic, specifically the IEEE 754 standard. (You might be surprised at how much you thought you knew, but didn't.) Then I will move on to R. W. Hamming's five main ideas about computation: Emphasis on the purpose of the computation, generalization of algorithms into families, roundoff error, truncation error, and feedback (stability). I hope to give enough practical information to help you avoid the most common problems inherent in numerical computation, and to point out resources that could help you go further.

Speaker Bio

Robert Goddard is a physicist and software developer. For the last 31 years, he has worked at the Applied Physics Laboratory of the University of Washington, mainly on computer modeling of underwater sound. He is the architect and team leader for the Sonar Simulation Toolset (SST), which produces simulated underwater sound, suitable as input to sophisticated signal processing systems (including human ears and brains), based on user-specified descriptions of the undersea environment, the listening system, and the sound sources and targets that might be out there. He has also developed systems for control of measurement devices, data analysis, visualization, modeling of quantum mechanical scattering, and optimization of parameter values to fit observations.

Bob has been an active participant in NWCPP for most of its existence, and is currently Treasurer.

Update: video and slides