Joe Duffy, Microsoft

Multi-core computer architectures pose both a threat and an opportunity to modern software. The amount of computing power that will soon be available will enable mainstream applications to solve problems that require computing power that has until recently only been available in supercomputers. But it also means that our software needs to evolve alongside to better support and enable the levels of concurrency we'll need to effectively use all of those cores. This fact applies as much to reusable software libraries as it does to applications themselves.

This new direction imposes some new and interesting constraints on the architecture of reusable software components, including the need to remain thread agnostic, expose latency characteristics and mechanisms for hiding latency, and, for computationally expensive library routines, some way to carry them out in parallel based on the context in which they were called. These are all areas which have not yet been researched heavily and which commercial library vendors are only now beginning to seriously deal with.

This talk presents an overview of the problem, identifies some key challenges, and proposes some direction for enabling our software to both take advantage of concurrency and to avoid inhibiting it. While the discussion has been derived from experiences on the Windows and .NET Framework platforms, the ideas presented aim to transcend any specific technology.