Introducing Parallelism into your programs

Overview

A little over a month ago, I volunteered to develop a session for the Windows 7 / Windows Server R2 launches that are being delivered across the country and beyond  The session I worked on I affectionately call “An Introduction to Parallel Programming”.  In that session I wanted to illustrate various approaches you can take when introducing parallelism to your applications: 1) Fine-grained parallelism, 2) Structured parallelism  and 3) PLINQ.

The approach I chose was to start with an a sequential application and parallelize it using each of the 3 approaches.  The application I wrote simply creates a thumbnail image for every image in a specific directory.  This post provides a link to a screencast I did on this subject, provides a brief overview of each approach and illustrates how my sample program looks with each approach.

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