I forgot to blog about this until now because of focusing on the Effective Concurrency course in Stockholm a few weeks ago, but to answer those who wonder if I’ll be giving it again in North America too: Yes, I’m also giving the public Effective Concurrency course again at the end of this month at the Construx facility in Bellevue, WA, USA. This will be the full four-day version of the course. Spaces are still available.

I’ll cover the following topics:

• Fundamentals: Define basic concurrency goals and requirements • Understand applications’ scalability needs • Key concurrency patterns
• Isolation — Keep work separate: Running tasks in isolation and communicate via async messages • Integrating multiple messaging systems, including GUIs and sockets • Building responsive applications using background workers • Threads vs. thread pools
• Scalability — Re-enable the Free Lunch: When and how to use more cores • Exploiting parallelism in algorithms • Exploiting parallelism in data structures • Breaking the scalability barrier
• Consistency — Don’t Corrupt Shared State: The many pitfalls of locks–deadlock, convoys, etc. • Locking best practices • Reducing the need for locking shared data • Safe lock-free coding patterns • Avoiding the pitfalls of general lock-free coding • Races and race-related effects
• High Performance Concurrency: Machine architecture and concurrency • Costs of fundamental operations, including locks, context switches, and system calls • Memory and cache effects • Data structures that support and undermine concurrency • Enabling linear and superlinear scaling
• Migrating Existing Code Bases to Use Concurrency
• Near-Future Tools and Features

I hope to see some of you there!

Update 8/19: I had planned to do the EC course again in October (hence the post title) but that now has to be deferred to sometime in the new year. Sorry for any inconvenience to those of you who had already registered, or were planning to. I’ll blog about it here when it’s rescheduled.

The webinar I did with James Reinders three weeks ago is now online for on-demand viewing. The link is the same as before:

Five Years Since Free Lunches: Making Use of Multicore Parallelism

Reflecting on the five years since "The Free Lunch is Over" article and the arrival of multicore processors, Sutter and Reinders will talk about the keys to making effective use of multicore parallelism. Programmers are in the midst of an evolution that takes time, and we are still in the early days. Sutter and Reinders share expert advice on how to view this transition, and the keys to getting it right—including a three-pillar model for concurrency, the need to maximize the number of tasks expressed in a program, and how abstractions encourage "many task" programming, while allowing overheads to be driven down under-the-covers.

Intel wants you to register (which is free), then you can watch the video and listen to the live (and sometimes quite lively) Q&A we held at the end. I hope you enjoy it!

Note: When we did it live, the audio was missing for part of the presentation. I’m told the glitch has been fixed, and the complete video, soundtrack and all, is available in the on-demand version.