Software and the Concurrency Revolution

A concurrency revolution is underway, as nonconcurrent applications will no longer exploit the continued exponential performance growth in modern mainstream CPUs. Unfortunately, none of today’s mainstream languages and environments deal well with concurrency. This talk summarizes the issues involved, and gives an overview of various efforts underway to advance the state of the art in concurrent software, including Herb’s Concur project which is exploring higher-level concurrency abstractions for today’s imperative languages.

Presenter(s)

Herb is an architect in Microsoft's Developer Division, where he is currently the designer of the Concur concurrency extensions for existing programming languages. He also chairs the ISO C++ standards committee, and is the author of four acclaimed books and hundreds of technical papers, including the widely-cited essay "The Free Lunch Is Over" that coined that term and "concurrency revolution" to describe the software sea change now in progress to exploit increasingly parallel hardware.