Hazim Shafi's Blog

I was approached recently by a request to help a Microsoft customer improve his application’s performance. He had a managed application that exhibited a fair amount of data level parallelism in a long-running for_each loop. When that loop was parallelized...

Hi, I hope that some of you can join us at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) at Hamburg this week. Keith Yedlin and I will be giving a tutorial today about the Parallel Computing Platform team's technologies in Visual Studio 2010 (...

Hi, The April issue of MSDN magazine is out, and we were happy to see an article entitled "Better Coding with Visual Studio 2010" by Doug Turnure that also briefly covers the Concurrency Visualizer. I encourage you all to read it here because it contains...

Hi folks, I'd like you all to be aware of an issue that can affect the quality or functionality of the Concurrency Visualizer. Our tool relies heavily on gathering timestamps in order to correlate events across cores and threads. When running on a...

Hi, I've received many requests for a more in-depth article on the features of the Concurrency Visualizer in VS2010. Well, I'm happy to report that I've come through with an article entitled "Performance Tuning with the Concurrency Visualizer in Visual...

Hi, I've recently posted a short article on how you can use the Concurrency Visualizer to understand the performance of MPI (Message Passing Interface) applications. You can find it at our team's blog . Also, this week I'm giving a talk at Gamefest...

Those of you who are used to doing performance analysis can appreciate the value of reducing interference between your application and other applications and services running on the system under study. So far, I've been using the Visual Studio IDE to...

In my PDC 2008 presentation, I showed how the Concurrency Visualizer in Visual Studio 2010 allows users the option of instrumenting their code in order to link the visualizations with application constructs or phases of execution. The Concurrency Visualizer...

Hi, In my previous post, I mentioned the "Demystify" feature of our tool that isn't quite working in the VS2010 Beta 2 release (Premium and Ultimate versions). Our team has now placed a web-based preview of this feature on our Team Blog . Demystify...

Hi, I'm very excited about the release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 that is going to be available to MSDN subscribers today and to the general public on 10/21. This release includes significant improvements in many areas that I'm sure you'll love....

A common source of performance bugs is disk I/O. In this blog, I'm going to give an overview of the features in our tool that help developers understand source of I/O stalls, including determining latency, files involved, and relating behavior to application...

In this article, I describe the first of a series of Performance Patterns that you can use the VSTS concurrency visualization tool to identify. I thought that it would be appropriate to start with a simple lock contention scenario. The code that I will...

This is a second post in the series about the parallel performance tools that my team is shipping in VS2010. In the previous post, I gave a quick overview of the features of our tools. In this post, I will demonstrate how you can start analyzing your...

Today, Microsoft’s Developer Division released Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 for general download. VS2010 is a fully installable release that you can use to preview the great features that we have been working on. I’m especially excited about the beta release...

I'm excited to be presenting our work on parallel performance tools in Visual Studio 2010 to Microsoft MVPs today. I will be covering the features of our tools and improvements that we have made since PDC for native and managed developers. I'm looking...

Many of our customers are asking us for guidance on what they can do to make use of multicore systems. This is a good time to be thinking about this problem since single thread performance will remain relatively flat for the forseeable future. As developers...

This week, a few members of the Parallel Computing Platform team are at Supercomputing 2008 in Austin. We will be demonstrating the parallel programming tools (e.g., Parallel Pattern Library and Task Parallel Library) as well as the parallel debugging...

Hi, Yesterday, the Parallel Computing Platform team at Microsoft announced the parallel performance tools shipping in Visual Studio 2010 during my presentation at PDC2008. If you missed it, you can view the presentation, including demos here . The...

Hi, My name is Hazim Shafi and I'm an Architect in the Parallel Computing Platform team at Microsoft. My primary reponsibility is parallel performance analysis tools. I received a BSEE from Santa Clara and MS and PhD degrees from Rice University. For...