Chris L. Bennett

One of the areas of programming I'm drawn to is in parallel processing. And for the past several years, I've looked for different techniques used for parallel processing. The primary method of parallel processing in .Net are simple threads. Although there is a Thread Pool available for each process it is not all that flexible, nor is it useful for small tasks such as loops. These problem are compounded when you start to look at the computers we use these days. We've begun the transition from a large single core process to smaller dual and quad core processors. This is only the beginning when you consider Intel has prototyped processors with 80 cores.

In order to accommodate this change in processing power as programmers we will need to adapt our programs. A interesting technology that is on the horizon from Microsoft .Net is the Parallel FX Library. It is currently available as a Customer Technology Preview (CTP). It implements a couple of variations on some techniques we use today, including For Each, Do and While loops.

So with the ability to perform parallel loops it allows the most basic of programs to take advantage of these additional processing cores. Of course we as programmers will still need to perform locking on the variables to prevent corruption. I'm definitely looking forward to see this library available for programming our every day apps. Below is a diagram of the Parallel FX Library on top of the .NET Framework 3.5.

Last week I was asked to participate in a charity event locally in Indianapolis, IN.  I've donated my time before for events, but not like this.  Recently I was on Church Counsel for a local United Methodist Church for the mainly because of my web skills.  I about fell out of my chair when I realized this event was primarily for developers.  The purpose for the event is to allow developers to build websites and other software apps for charities and non-profit organizations that could not other wise afford it.  The name of the event is Indy Give Camp.  

This event is being put on by the IndyNDA, otherwise known as the Indy .Net Association for developers.  I'm a member of the IndyNDA group and I have to say that the organization is really well run and overall the monthly meetings are top notch.

If you are a fellow developer and you have the chance, be sure to stop by one of the IndyNDA events.  Another event that is put on by IndyNDA is IndyCodeCamp.  This is a free day-long conference for developers on all sorts of topics in the developer space.  Last year I presented at IndyCodeCamp on the AJAX Control Toolkit.  As it turns out, I'm going to present again this year on Tip's and Trick's for VB.NET 9.  Should be an interesting event and I'm certainly looking forward to attending a couple of the sessions myself.

I never really thought about what was the fastest ride on earth until I saw a recent Modern Marvels episode on the History Channel. I knew the Mclaren F1 would do 240mph and vague knew of another that could come come close to 250mph. Then the land speed record which is currently held by the Thrust SSC Team who broke the sound barrier in 1997.

I never really gave much thought to the military .... But as I was watching the show I expected to hear a speed of 3, 4 or maybe Mach 5. In fact they have a sled at the Holloman Air Force base capable of Mach 8.5 or just over 6400mph. It was an unmanned vehicle and it ran on rails. To achieve this speed the team used 4 stage rocket and carried a payload of 25-pound. Not only did it achieve Mach 8.5 it only had 3 miles of track to do it in. Your average car cannot achieve 60mph in 6 seconds. This thing went from 0 to 6400mph in 6.04 seconds using up 3 miles of track. When I saw the brief video of the test I instantly had several questions like how did they keep it on the track. Unlike other railed vehicles the rocked sled does not use wheels it uses a shoe type device that wraps around the rail to hold the sled down. And how do they keep those from melting at 6400mph? Unfortunately, they did not talk about stopping the sled and how could you. If it took 3 miles to reach Mach 8.5 how much room would you need. At the end of the the track there must have been a huge creator.

Given the way our military works, the Mach 8.5 record has probably been superseded by another speed record. Have they reached Mach 10 yet? I guess we will find out in a few years after it becomes declassified.

Although, I'm not an expert at all in particle physics, its good to see that after years of work, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is now online. Well, not exactly ... The LHC is functional from the stance that it is able to send particles in both directions around the ring; however, no collisions have taken place. It is amazing to think that the 17 mile ring will collide particles at 99.999999% percent the speed of light. Yep, you read that right. Granted we are talking about micrograms of matter traveling at that speed. From what's been in the press the first collisions are to start taking place sometime in late October. The high energy collisions are scheduled to take place in about a year.

So what are we actually going to learn from this? I think there is a lot of speculation around what we will learn, but no one actually knows. Many think they will locate the Higgs boson particle which is believed to give matter its weight. I'm intrigued by the fact that Steven Hawking has bet $100 that we will not find the particle. His view is one where we will probaly find something even more interesting.

No matter what we find it should be interesting. Something I didn't know until all of the press regarding the LHC came about is that the USA actually start building a similar test facility in the early 90's called the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). Unfortunately the project was cut in '93. The US version of the LHC was actually planned to be much larger and far more powerful (54 miles instead of 17 and nearly three times as powerful).

Last weekend I was listening to a live recording of a podcast called Leo Laporte "The Tech Guy". During the show he did an interview with a physicist friend involved with the show. Some of the information she (I'm sorry I do not know her name) discussed related to the amount of data that will from the detectors when the LHC is running. I was completely shocked to find out that the LHC detectors produce nearly a petabyte of data per second. Today it is not common place yet to refer to data in petabytes as is gigabytes or terabytes. To deal with such a volume of data they LHC employs several hardware solutions to perform a great deal of filtering to skip any "uninteresting" data. Still the amount of data that must be stored must be huge. I would guess they are planning to use a grid of some time maybe event use the SETI@home concept.

In the end, I'm sure we will learn quite a bit from this big science project.

Well I bought this site a couple of weeks ago and I finally got around to actually putting a site together.  Primarily this site with be the main blog where I plan to capture some of my thoughts relating to technology in several different topics. 

I'm somewhat new to the content side of the web; however, I've been creating websites for years for others to create the content.  Nevertheless, I thought I would try my hand at it.  By trade, I'm a Microsoft.Net Developing building both WinForms and ASP.NET apps in C# and VB.Net.

My interestes are certainly in new developer technologies but in may other areas as well including science, technology in general, etc.