by Gaston Hillar
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 includes many interesting improvements related to its multicore programming features. The parallelism and concurrency profiling tools allow developers to visualize the behavior of a multithreaded application on multicore microprocessors and collect resource contention data.
If you want to translate multicore power into application performance, you have to make sure your concurrent software threads are running on hardware threads taking advantage of parallelism. Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 improved many profiling reports related to parallelism and concurrency.
The IDE uses the name Concurrency. However, I’d rather talk about both parallelism and concurrency. When you create a multithreaded application, using task-based programming or raw threads, you’re creating concurrent code. Nonetheless, it doesn’t mean that the concurrent code is going to run in parallel all the time. It depends on the decisions taken by the operating system scheduler, the underlying hardware and the synchronization problems, among others. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate whether the programmed concurrency is taking advantage of certain parallel hardware capabilities.
