Today is an extraordinarily exciting day for me.  After about two years of work by several great people across the company, the first Parallel Extensions (a.k.a. Parallel FX) CTP has been posted to MSDN.   Check out Soma’s blog post for an overview, and the new MSDN parallel computing dev center for more details.  Keep an eye on the team’s new blog too, as we’ll be posting a lot of content there as we make progress on the library; in fact, thanks to Steve (who writes blog posts in his sleep), there’s already a bunch of reading to catch up on!

I began kicking the tires on PLINQ back in October of 2005.  In September of 2006, I described PLINQ as “a fully functional prototype” and “research.”  Well, it’s come a long way since then, and we’re finally ready for real human beings to start hammering on it.  Not only that, but we’ve expanded the scope of the original project significantly, from PLINQ to Parallel FX, to include new imperative data parallel APIs (for situations where expressing a problem in LINQ is unnatural), powerful task APIs that offer waiting and cancelation, all supported by a common work scheduler based on CILK-style work-stealing techniques developed in collaboration with Microsoft Research.  And there’s even more to come.  Daniel Moth spilled some beans in his screencast on Channel9 when he described the additional data structures, like synchronization primitives and scalable collections, which will come online later.  Some of them are even in the new CTP, but have remained internal for now.

The shift to parallel computing will have an industry-wide impact, and will undoubtedly take several phases and many years to tame completely.  We have focused on the lowest hanging fruit and the most important foundational shifts in direction we can incite—like encouraging the over-representation of latent parallelism to aid in future scalability—but there are certainly things that the current CTP doesn’t fully address.  GPGPUs, verifiable thread safety, automatic parallelism, great tools support, etc., are all topics that are of great interest to us.  We have a lot of work to do for the final release of Parallel FX, and expect a whole lot of feedback from the community on specific features and general direction.  So let us have it!  You can use our Connect site, or even just email me directly at joedu AT you-know-where DOT com.

Consider this an early Christmas present.  Now you have something fun to do, in the privacy of your own office, when trying to avoid family members during the holidays.  Whoops—did I say that out loud?  Enjoy!