Sutter’s Mill

In a couple of months, I’ll be giving a keynote at the AMD Fusion Developer’s Summit, which will be held on June 13-16, 2011, in Bellevue, WA, USA.

Here’s my talk’s description as it appears on the conference website:

AFDS Keynote: “Heterogeneous Parallelism at Microsoft”
Herb Sutter, Microsoft Principal Architect, Native Languages

Parallelism is not just in full bloom, but increasingly in full variety. We know that getting full computational performance out of most machines—nearly all desktops and laptops, most game consoles, and the newest smartphones—already means harnessing local parallel hardware, mainly in the form of multicore CPU processing. This is the commoditization of the supercomputer.

More and more, however, getting that full performance can also mean using gradually ever-more-heterogeneous processing, from local GPGPU and Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) flavors to “often-on” remote parallel computing power in the form of elastic compute clouds. This is the generalization of the heterogeneous cluster in all its NUMA glory, and it’s appearing at all scales from on-die to on-machine to on-cloud.

In this talk, Microsoft’s chief native languages architect shares a vision of what this will mean for native software on Microsoft platforms from servers to devices, and showcases upcoming innovations that bring access to increasingly heterogeneous compute resources — from vector units and multicore, to GPGPU and APU, to elastic cloud — directly into the world’s most popular native languages.

If you’re interested in high performance code for GPUs, APUs, and other high-performance TLAs, I hope to see you there.

Note: This talk is related to, but different from, the GPU talk I’ll be presenting in August at C++ and Beyond 2011 (aka C&B). You can expect the above keynote to be, well, keynote-y… oriented toward software product features and of course AMD’s hardware, with plenty of forward-looking industry vision style material. My August C&B technical talk will be just that, an in-depth performance-oriented and sometimes-gritty technical session that will also mention product-related and hardware-specific stuff but is primarily about heterogeneous hardware, with a more pragmatically focused forward-looking eye.