Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Part two of the multi-core computing series

Check out part two of my Javaworld series on multi-core computing here.

This article builds on Part One and describes and implements a simple threaded framework leveraging Java 5/6 features that you can use to build benchmarks pertinent to your application as you look to find the best hardware for your system. The source code for the article is here. Enjoy!

Thursday, August 03, 2006

New Javaworld article on multi-core computing

My latest Javaworld article details the issues around multi-core computing from a Java perspective with some initial discussion on the theory behind parallel computing (Amdahl, Gustafson et al.).. From the article "Hardware is really just software crystallized early," says Alan C. Kay in his paper "The Early History of Smalltalk" (ACM, 1993). This quote really explains the inspiration for this article. Software developers have always been at the mercy of hardware manufacturers, although we've had a pretty easy ride of it since the inception of the computing industry itself. From then until now, increasing speeds of every single component that goes into the standard Von Neumann architecture have given our software literally free increases in performance.

No longer.
"

This is a good article to read in order to understand how all the major vendors are in the middle of a concerted move to multi-core computing, how that affects the software you design and develop and Java support for multi-core computing.

Check it out here

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Can't we just keep it Simple? (Javaworld SOA article)

Check out my latest JEE / SOA article on Javaworld here.

The core premise of the article is the KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid!) principle - SOA has definite benefits when applied to some JEE projects, but not to all and developers need to remain wary of "silver bullet" promises made by SOA vendors.