Phil's Blog

I’ve recently joined the Microsoft HealthVault team in a Solutions Architect role with a focus on assisting our partners and customers as they build great HealthVault integrated solutions.             ...

Recall the following axiom from your CS101 class…? “To solve a problem, create abstractions.   To attain efficiency, remove abstractions.” Such is the case with I/O in the Cloud (i.e. all Clouds).   Efficiency requires designing for...

I recently attended an excellent new course offered by Acceleware covering the C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (AMP) library and tools.   AMP extends the C++ language to enable high-scale data-parallel computational algorithms and targets...

Download the script files associated with this topic from here .  Refer to the authoritative documentation for this topic here . This feature functionality applies when utilizing Windows HPC Server to deploy compute nodes onto Windows Azure using...

Easily Develop Distributed Parallel Computing Solutions for Windows Azure. A new optional extension of the Windows Azure SDK, the Windows Azure HPC Scheduler SDK enables developers to create a new class of Windows Azure solutions.   The SDK...

Note the recent release of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 2 with a list of new features.   A corresponding new distributed runtime for “big data” parallel computing is concurrently released in beta form.   The “new” runtime...

We recently completed a collaboration with the Quantum Theory Group at Ames Laboratory, Iowa State University, to update and tune the GAMESS application for Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 .   Obtain the source code here and learn more about chemistry...

Just expanding the reach of Giovanni’s excellent walk-thru on this topic, click here…

Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (released in December, 2010) includes new functionality for “burst-mode” integration with Windows Azure worker-role compute nodes. The integrated solution, in it’s current form, is intended primarily...

The SP1 RC is now available for evaluation download.   Please see the following associated resources: Technical Forum Frequently Asked Questions New Features Details SP1 Deployment Guide

Two big product announcements in as many days!   The IE9 beta is available for evaluation and the Windows Phone 7 Developer Kit is ready as well.  

Many of us are still awaiting the many-core machines we keep reading about. But, writing code for these systems really should begin today. In practice, there’s not a tremendous difference in writing code that targets an 8-core machine versus one...

The Microsoft Patterns & Practices team has announced completion of their latest publication subtitled Design Patterns for Decomposition and Coordination of Multicore Architectures .   Draft chapters of this book have been available via...

One of the clear differences between the release of Visual Studio 2010 (VS2010) and any of its predecessors is the new support for developing parallel code for multi-core computers. If you are a .NET developer, the 4.0 .NET Framework includes PLINQ and...

Like me, you may have missed the AzGroups.org Day of .NET event in Phoenix during the latter part of May.  I highly recommend the Hanselman treatment of OData and especially if your a bit confused by the pesky rebranding engine that hopefully has...

You'll want to check-out these two new tools that extend the functionality of Visual Studio and make it easier to develop common types of desktop, web, and azure applications. Web Matrix is announced here ... LightSwitch is detailed here ...

The UPCRC at the University of Illinois is hosting it’s 2010 Summer School on Multicore Programming (July 19-23), at the Siebel Center for Computer Science.  Microsoft’s participation in this event represents a collaboration between Microsoft Developer...

A common pattern in parallel computing scenarios is the task scheduling/execution scenario of initialization(1) –> parallel-work-execution(N) –> finalization(1).   The initialization phase runs once (as a single task) followed by the parallel...

Customers tell us that the verified compatibility of their applications is the #1 factor driving their upgrade decisions. Verifying compatibility with Windows Server 2008 R2 before the application ships promotes operational efficiency, improves scalability...

If you’re in Houston on May 17, please consider yourself welcome to join us for a presentation on Visual Studio 2010 and the Parallel Computing Platform.   More info here .

A common operation in parallel code design involves accumulating, or “reducing”, results from a number of concurrent operations into a single “all-up” result.   With the Parallel Computing Platform , this operation is associated closely with...

Learning Windows Azure development?   You’ll want to see the new “Bid-Now” sample application published on MSDN Code Gallery.   Read about it at David Aiken’s blog .

The Scripting Guys are back!  Every year, the Scripting Guys host something called the Scripting Games. It’s a fun competition in which participants attempt to solve beginner or advanced puzzles with scripts in either Windows PowerShell or VBScript...

The Visual Studio Launch will open a new chapter for Developers writing Windows applications.   Included with Visual Studio 2010 are several new parallel computing technologies and tools.   C++ Developers will discover the C++ Concurrency...

Today, Microsoft released the first Windows Phone 7 Developer Training Kit. The Kit included hands-on-labs that corresponds to the free Windows Phone 7 Developer tools CTP that was also released today. The training kit includes three Silverlight labs...