Imagine that 90,000 years ago, every man alive at the time picked a different last name. Assuming that last names are inherited from father to son, how many different last names do you think there would be today? It turns out that there would be only one last name! Similarly, imagine that 200,000 years ago, [...]
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Did you know that the performance of an if-statement depends on whether its condition has a predictable pattern? If the condition is always true or always false, the branch prediction logic in the processor will pick up the pattern. On the other hand, if the pattern is unpredictable, the if-statement will be much more expensive. [...]
Continue reading about Fast and slow if-statements: branch prediction in modern processors
Sometimes you need to access private fields and call private methods on an object – for testing, experimentation, or to work around issues in third-party libraries. .NET has long provided a solution to this problem: reflection. Reflection allows you to call private methods and read or write private fields from outside of the class, but [...]
Continue reading about Use C# dynamic typing to conveniently access internals of an object
The story of how GPU came to be used for high-performance computation is pretty cool. Hardware heavily optimized for graphics turned out to be useful for another use: certain types of high-performance computations. In this article, I will explore how and why this happened, and summarize the state of general computation on GPUs today. Programmable [...]
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div.mynote { border: black 1px solid; padding: 10px; background-color: #f0f0ff; margin-top: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-left: 10px; > The memory model is a fascinating topic – it touches on hardware, concurrency, compiler optimizations, and even math. The memory model defines what state a thread may see when it reads a memory location modified by other threads. [...]
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div.mynote { border: black 1px solid; padding: 10px; background-color: #f0f0ff; margin-top: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-left: 10px; > As a software developer, you certainly have a high-level picture of how web apps work and what kinds of technologies are involved: the browser, HTTP, HTML, web server, request handlers, and so on. In this article, we will [...]
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Most of my readers will understand that cache is a fast but small type of memory that stores recently accessed memory locations. This description is reasonably accurate, but the “boring” details of how processor caches work can help a lot when trying to understand program performance. In this blog post, I will use code samples [...]
PDC 2009 was an exciting event, with announcements about Azure, Silverlight 4, and Office 2010 popping up one after another. For me, there was another reason why this year’s PDC was exciting – it was my first chance to present in a major conference.
Continue reading about Video of my PLINQ session at PDC 2009
Around two weeks ago, I found this email in my inbox, with the subject “Complaint about Robozzle”: Hi Igor Robozzle is really cute, I like it, but why on earth is it polluted with hundreds of invisible links to porn sites? From a guy like you I don’t expect to do such dirty things. pls [...]
Continue reading about RoboZZle hacked, and 100+ sites are still compromised
Did you ever see one of those auto-generated random “academic papers” like this one? When I first saw the following title, my first thought was that it is a randomly-generated “paper”: Implications of the Turing completeness of reaction-diffusion models, informed by GPGPU simulations on an XBox 360: Cardiac arrhythmias, re-entry and the Halting problem [PDF] [...]
Continue reading about Human heart is a Turing machine, research on XBox 360 shows. Wait, what?
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