Think Parallel

Bryce Adelstein Lelbach

⏱ 90 minute session
beginner
intermediate
11:00-12:30, Friday, 19th April 2024
By default, we think sequentially. Parallelism is often seen as challenging and complex. Tools to be used sparingly and cautiously, and only by experts.

But we must shatter these assumptions, for today, we live in a parallel world. Almost every hardware platform is parallel, from the smallest embedded devices to the largest supercomputers.

We must change our mindset. Anyone who writes code has to think in parallel. Parallelism must become our default.

In this example-driven talk, we will journey into the world of parallelism. We'll look at four algorithms and data structures in depth, comparing and contrasting different implementation strategies and exploring how they will perform both sequentially and in parallel.

During this voyage, we'll uncover and discuss some foundational principles of parallelism, such as latency hiding, localizing communication, and efficiency vs performance tradeoffs. By the time we're done, you'll be thinking in parallel.

🏷 parallelism
🏷 asynchrony
🏷 concurrency
🏷 parallel algorithms
🏷

Bryce Adelstein Lelbach

Bryce Adelstein Lelbach has spent over a decade developing programming languages, compilers, and software libraries. He is a Principal Architect at NVIDIA, where he leads HPC programming language efforts and drives the technical roadmap for NVIDIA's HPC compilers and libraries. Bryce is passionate about C++ and is one of the leaders of the C++ community. He has served as chair of INCITS/PL22, the US standards committee for programming languages and the Standard C++ Library Evolution group. Bryce served as the program chair for the C++Now and CppCon conferences for many years. On the C++ Committee, he has personally worked on concurrency primitives, parallel algorithms, executors, and multidimensional arrays. He is one of the founding developers of the HPX parallel runtime system.