Microsoft Pushes Parallel Programming For The Masses

During a PDC panel on the future of programming, Don Box, a Microsoft software architect and distinguished engineer, said, “My day job is to make programmers learn to love the database.”

So Microsoft is attacking the problem of parallel programming from a number of fronts. And the company is doing it in the traditional Microsoft way of making its technology available to a large number of customers at a reasonable cost – the traditional “high-volume, low-cost” Microsoft strategy. Pushing early stage support for parallel programming out in its standard integrated development environment, Visual Studio, is a first step.

“There is a lot of early thinking that is happening in multiple dimensions of the company and a few concrete things that we know that we are delivering in Visual Studio 2010.”

What Microsoft is delivering in Visual Studio 2010 includes tooling such as debugging tools for coding for concurrency, and delivering parallel libraries to enable developers to parallelize certain parts of their application – such as the Task Parallel Library (TPL).

“We also have a runtime that we call the concurrency runtime that enables you to take advantage of this, move to parallelism,” Somasegar said. “So we feel like we are taking the first few good steps toward providing a complete stack for you as a software developer to be able to start parallelising your applications.”

Democratising parallel processing

By shipping this technology with Visual Studio 2010, “The goal is to democratise parallel programming so that even I can take advantage of this,” Somasegar said. He said that until recently, even thinking about let alone attempting to do parallel programming “was relegated to an elite few. But the advent of multicore and many core machines means this is something the whole world has to think about.”

Moreover, “The Windows guys are working to see what changes we need in the operating system to support this new construct,” Somasegar said.

Indeed they are. Michael Angiulo, Microsoft’s general manager of planning and PC ecosystem for Windows, said Microsoft is hard at work addressing the parallel computing issue in the Windows operating system, and Windows 7 has its share of support for multicore systems in that it can scale to support up to 256 processors, among other things.

“The new way to get more processing power onto a single piece of silicon is to add cores,” Angiulo told eWEEK. “And it’s a very interesting problem to understand how you create a software development paradigm that takes advantage of that. Because most software problems are not inherently multi-threaded.”

Meanwhile, Microsoft is looking at adding parallel extensions to its existing languages and also has a research-driven effort to develop a whole new language for parallel programming, known as Axum. Axum is an incubation project from Microsoft’s Parallel Computing Platform that aims to validate a safe and productive parallel programming model for the .NET framework. And Microsoft has released support for Axum in the beta version of Visual Studio 2010.In addition to Axum, Microsoft’s F# functional programming language also supports parallel programming. “We start from a programming language – a functional language like F# naturally lends itself to parallel programming. But there is work that needs to be done at the library level and work to be done at the runtime level as well.”

Somasegar added, “We think about Axum and we ask ourselves should we invent a new programming language or should we extend an existing programming language. Conventional wisdom says if you are a VB programmer or a C# programmer, telling you you need to go learn something completely new is a hard sell.”

At the same time, however, “We want to make sure that our current languages that you’re already familiar with have the right extensions built into the language so that you can easily extend your existing app,” Somasegar said. “The good thing is I don’t know of anybody else that is any further ahead of us on this. And we think the train is going to leave the station with or without us, so we may as well be ready for it.”