PDC2008 Symposium
Two symposia are included in PDC2008. The titles for the symposia are as follows:
Each symposium consists of three related sessions on the last day of PDC, and they
provide much more detail about two key topics covered throughout PDC. A Parallel
Computing symposium extends the PDC discussion to how multi-core architectures will
significantly increase available computing power and the opportunities that will
create. A Cloud Services Architectures symposium will step back from the various
cloud services covered throughout PDC and discuss how best to connect local software
to key cloud services. Together, the two PDC symposia will help all developers,
architects, and technical managers to better prepare for the challenges and opportunities
that will come with increasingly more multi-core processing power coupled with powerful
cloud-based services and platforms.
Symposium Title: Parallel Computing – A Detailed Look at How Multi-Core Architectures
will Unleash Computing Power and Enable Innovation
Symposium Abstract: The compute power encapsulated by the manycore architectures
holds the promise of delivering immersive and natural computing experiences to people
and businesses. Parallel computing is the key to unlock this power. This symposium
frames the challenges of parallelism, presents Microsoft’s roadmap for delivering
technologies to solve them, and provides guidance in planning for future solutions.
Presenters from Microsoft and Intel will discuss the innovative opportunities that
can be opened up by highly parallel applications such as immersive, graphically
intensive virtual environments coupled with natural human/computer interfaces and
realistic physics. They will discuss how Microsoft and Intel are working together
to provide complementary offerings to lead the developers and the PC industry into
the manycore era. The symposium concludes with a discussion of incubation technologies
designed to help developers produce correct, efficient, maintainable and scalable
parallel programs of the future.
Session 1 of 3: Addressing the Hard Problems of Concurrency
Speakers: Lynne Hill, David Callahan
This session will frame the issues of applying multi-core processors to general-purpose
software and the key impacts this will have on developers and platforms. We describe
a set of “hard problems” that must be addressed to enable parallel software to be
deployed with the same reliability and productivity demanded of mainstream software.
We further describe the key architectural changes Microsoft is making to Windows
as an application platform that will enable it to execute parallel software efficiently.
Session 2 of 3: Parallel Computing Application Opportunities and Architectures
Speakers: Jerry Bautista (Intel), John Feo
Parallel Computing opens up potential for new categories of applications and user
interaction, which in turn, drives business innovations. In this session, Intel
will discuss its vision for Connected Visual Computing, followed by Microsoft’s
guidance on how developers can architect applications that are correct, scalable,
and responsive.
Session 3 of 3: Future of Parallel Computing
Speakers: Selena Wilson, David Callahan, Nikla Gustafssons, Sean Nordberg, James Reinder (Intel)
In the PDC sessions, you have learned about Microsoft’s near term solutions for
helping you build and debug applications. In this session, Intel will describe its
near term support for Microsoft Visual Studio with Intel Parallel Studio, and Microsoft
and Intel will extend those concepts into the future by presenting their plans and
perspective on incubation technologies related to parallel computing, such as software
transaction memory, agents and tools.
Symposium Title: Head in the Cloud, Feet on the Ground – A Practical Look at Architectural
Challenges and Opportunities with Identity, Management, Data and Interoperability
in the Cloud
Symposium Abstract: A lot of new technologies are presented at PDC2008, but what
are the tradeoffs and how will they affect existing solutions? This symposium will
help “connect the dots”. Using a rich set of scenarios, we will cover details of
the architectural challenges and opportunities with embracing both local software
and cloud services. We also will offer emerging best practices for overcoming challenges
in key areas including Identity, Management, Data, and Interoperability.
Session 1 of 3: Expanding Applications to the Cloud
Speakers: Simon Guest, Gianpaolo Carraro
In this session, we will take an enthusiastic yet pragmatic look at the cloud opportunities.
We will explore a few examples of cloud-based infrastructure usage as part of an
existing application, and we will discuss the architectural tradeoffs as well as
best practices resulting from that usage.
Session 2 of 3: Making Enterprise Grade Cloud Applications
Speakers: Eugenio Pace
Hosted applications today do not offer many of the features that large enterprises
expect around identity, management, and data. In this session, we will walk through
detailed examples of ‘enterprise grade’ hosted application design. At the end of
the session, you will understand how to implement a federated identity scenario,
enable remote management of your application and allow a richer control on how the
data is stored.
Session 3 of 3: Cloud or No Cloud, the Laws of Physics Still Apply
Speakers: Gianpaolo Carraro
Bandwidth is not infinite and certainly not free, latency is bound by speed of light,
and storage density is increasing. How will all this affect your architecture? In
this final session, we will discuss emerging patterns that take into account the
physical aspects of a cloud-based application.
