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olivier deheurles
About one month ago I watched a video describing the architecture of LMAX (Financial Exchange) and realized that I did not know that much about hardware. I made some researches and found really good documents, blogs and videos and I thought it may be a good idea to share my findings First I would recommend to have a look at LMAX - How to Do 100K TPS at Less than 1ms Latency presented by Martin Thompson and Michael Barker, in about one hour it gives a pretty good overview of the challenges you have to face when building a HPC system with high level of contended concurrency. Comments below the video also worth having a look to get more details on there architecture. Then there is an excellent paper from Ulrich Drepper (Red Hat): What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory. It presents current commodity hardware architectures focusing on : RAM - dont be afraid by this first part, you can skip most of it, CPU Caches, cache coherency protocols, etc. very interesting and important to understand too Virtual memory the second half of the document focuses on what programmers can do (must read) and Memory performance tools (relevant if you are working on Linux systems). Paul E. McKenney, working on Linux kernel, is writing a book on parallel programing: Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can Y ou Do About It? I wont give a feedback yet because Ive not yet finished it yet but I can already say that its really worth reading. I have read as well several white papers from Herb Sutter (one of the C++ big names), you can find them on his web site, in his books and articles section. If you prefer videos there is Machine Architecture: Things Y our Programming Language Never Told Y ou video on Y ouTube with corresponding pdf slides. Interested by parallel programming and wants to learn more about wait-free, lock-free, obstruction free, etc.? If you are, you should really go on Dmitry Vyukovs website 1024cores and read the introduction and articles in order, they are pretty quick to read but very informative. Y ou will find as well lots of algorithms and data structures for parallel programming MUST READ. Y ou should subscribe to its blog as well. All documents and videos above are presented from the perspective of Linux/C++/Java but are very relevant even for a Windows/.NET developer. Now if you want to learn more about Windows and .NET I would recommend:

Joe Duffys blog and book are must read for parallel programming on Windows, Interested by internals of .NET Garbage collector? Maoni Stephens, working on the GC, presents latest evolutions of the .NET 4 GC in a Channel9 video, read here blog for more details. Patrick Dussud, one of the Microsoft Technical Fellows, and one of the CLR founders and chief architect of the .NET Garbage Collector, has some videos on the .NET GC internals here and here. Y ou will notice that Im not the only French guy with an horrible English accent ;) Ive downloaded as well the open source code of the .NET platform (Rotor). Y ou should really have a look. For instance you can find the C++ source code of the execution engine (\sscli20\clr\src\vm) and the corresponding BCL code in .NET (\sscli20\clr\src\bcl\system). Did you ever wondered how .NET objects are stored internally? Where is the implementation of extern methods for the BCL classes? Its there! The document Object Internals is a good companion to start browsing this large code base. CLR: Vance Morrison blog and Jeffrey Richters blog and book CLR via CSharp Windows internals: Mark Russinovich, Technical Fellow and Windows Kernel guru, has a good video Inside Windows 7 on Channel9 and his book Windows Internals, the absolute reference for Windows OS core. Other interesting stuff to read: Ring Buffer implementations (CPU Cache friendly + optimisations): MCRingBuffer and LibertyQueue white papers, False sharing: here and here (Herb Sutter strikes back) Last thing to say: Ive been reading quite a lot lately and its pretty hard to keep track of what you have read, what you would like to read, etc. Ive found Read It Later service extremely useful: it integrates with your browser (Chrome for me), a single click and you have added a document to your list of stuff to read and your mobile devices (iPhone, iPad for me) get synchronized automatically. It works quite well for HTML pages. For PDFs on Ipad/iPhone, GoodReader is a must. Note that it can connect to your DropBox if you have one, very useful to share documents between devices. Enjoy

Original URL:
http://odeheurles.com/2011/02/hardware-parallel-computing-and-stuff/