Two articles about ParallelFX (PFX) are in the October issue of MSDN magazine and have been posted online:
- Parallel LINQ: Running Queries on Multi-Core Processors. An overview of an implementation of LINQ-to-Objects and -XML which automagically uses data parallelism internally to execute declarative language queries. It supports the full set of LINQ operators, and several ways of consuming output in parallel.
- Parallel Performance: Optimize Managed Code for Multi-Core Machines. Describes the Task Parallel Library (TPL), a new "thread pool on steroids" with cancelation, waiting, and pool isolation support, among many other things. Uses dynamic work stealing techniques (see here and here) for superior scalability.
As noted in the article, there's a PFX CTP planned for 2007*. Watch my blog for more details when it's available.
*Note: some might wonder why we released the articles before the CTP was actually online. When we originally put the articles in the magazine's pipeline, our intent was that they would in fact line up. And both were meant to align with PDC'07. But when PDC was canceled, we also delayed our CTP so that we had more time to make progress on things that would have otherwise been cut. It's less than ideal, but I'm still confident this was the right choice.