Special Guest: Dr. Heinz Kabutz!!! @ Allan Gray

We are truly fortunate to have Dr. Heinz Kabutz vising Cape Town this month. Heinz is a Java Champion, the author of The Java Specialists' Newsletter, an international conference speaker, consultant and trainer (<a>http://www.javaspecialists.eu/about/heinz.jsp</a>;). He will be giving us a talk, hang out for a few drinks, and tell us about why he left us all and moved to Crete and how much he misses us.

Turbo Charge CPU Utilization in Fork/Join Using the ManagedBlocker

Fork/Join is a framework for parallelizing calculations using recursive decomposition, also called divide and conquer. These algorithms occasionally end up duplicating work, especially at the beginning of the run. We can reduce wasted CPU cycles by implementing a reserved caching scheme. Before a task starts its calculation, it tries to reserve an entry in the shared map. If it is successful, it immediately begins. If not, it blocks until the other thread has finished its calculation. Unfortunately this might result in a significant number of blocked threads, decreasing CPU utilization. In this talk we will demonstrate this issue and offer a solution in the form of the ManagedBlocker. Combined with the Fork/Join, it can keep parallelism at the desired level.

Please book early to avoid disappointment, and if you are not actually coming please cancel your reservation as soon as possible to allow others to take it and organisers to better cater for us.

A big thank you to Allan Gray for having us for the third time, and in particular to Theoca Voges!