arallel computing and concurrent programming are rapidly becoming mainstream topics for discussion in the corporate world. These are not new ideas; in fact they’ve been around for more than 30 years. However, like many long-running computer science concepts, they’re only now becoming relevant to mainstream business developers due to changes
f writing software is hard, then writing applications that will take full advantage of the ever-more-prevalent multicore/multi-CPU hardware?without introducing subtle race conditions and consistency errors?is even harder. Numerous solutions have been floated for Java as well as other environments, solutions such as software transactional memory API libraries, functional languages, and
emember the red telephone box, once a familiar sight on the streets of London? That’s a good example of mutually exclusive access to a shared resource, although you probably didn’t find any locks on them. Why? Because only one person at a time could use one to make a call,
he days of large increases in clock frequency are behind us. It was great while it lasted, but it’s now clear that we have finally hit a frequency wall. Contrary to popular opinion, that wall is due to heat and energy concerns, not the end of Moore’s Law. Instead, the
ith the processing power of single-core chips running out of steam, hardware manufacturers have turned to multicore processors to make up for the lack of processing power increases in single-core chips. Unfortunately, developing multicore-capable applications is not a transparent or plug-and-play solution. Such applications require developers to use parallel programming
fter downloading Sesame 3.0-alpha1, the first thing you might notice is that Sesame 3.0 is packaged slightly differently than in 2.x. The awkwardly named sesame-onejar.jar was replaced by sesame-client.jar and sesame-runtime.jar, the openrdf-workbench.war file is gone, and there is a new server script. The sesame-client.jar contains the RDF parsers and