You Are What You Read?
Well, if thats true, I am a mixture between a blog and a book. A blok maybe. Or a boog :smile:. Last week I have been writing about books. This week, it’s blogging week and I am going to tell you about the blogs I read related to parallel programming. All of them are really worth subscribing to in my humble opinion and maybe you will think so as well after you have taken a look at them.
insideHPC – HPC news for supercomputing professionals
insideHPC is John West’s baby, whom some of you may know from his last blogging project called The Only Trait of a Leader or from one of his articles at InfoWorld. I am featuring it first here because in its (relatively) short time online it has become my premier source of news about High-Performance Computing. Since I know many of my readers are from the HPC-crowd, I am sure at least some of you will likely enjoy it as well. John usually writes many short posts a day on various topics, usually a mix of a quote from a news source with short and sweet comment by him. Reading the news so you don’t have to – or something like that :-).
Generalities & Details: Adventures in the High-tech Underbelly
If you have read my blog for some time, you know Joe Duffy, because he was kind enough to let me interview him. If you are interested in parallel programming on Microsoft platforms, this blog is a must. If you are not into Windows, I would still recommend it, because many of his points can be adapted to a different environment quite easily. The blog itself consists of many, long posts full of juicy parallel programming content, mixed with a healthy dose of implementation details and architecture specifics – nothing to just skip over, but very worth studying in detail.
Linux High Performance Computing and Linux Clusters
Have not had enough HPC-news lately? Well, Ken Farmer can help you then. Quite a bit older than insideHPC, this site accumulates Linux news for supercomputing professionals. It has everything from short news quotes, over longer articles to press releases.
scalability.org – not so random musings and mutterings about high performance computing
Joe has been one of the first people to link to my blog when it was still new and shiny – and I will be grateful for that forever ;-). His blog is about HPC in general, but Joe choses his topics very selectively. Lately, he has been on a Microsoft killing spree. Very often he is blogging about some particular piece of hardware they are testing in his labs. Or he chooses to rave about a Linux distribution, company politics or whatever annoys/amuses that day. I admit, the connection to parallel programming is getting quite thin there, but his blog is still fun to read. What he does not have is full content in his newsfeeds, which I find annoying. But that may be personal preference…
Serial to Parallel to Distributed
Marc Jacobs’ blog is quite new in my newsreader, but still very worth checking out. Marc writes about parallel programming, especially but not limited to the .NET platform. Gems like his Analog Concurrency: Boarding a Plane I always find amusing and link-worthy. Be prepared that he has a very irregular posting frequency, though.
Clay Breshears
In Clays blog (part of the Intel software network) there are many hidden gems about parallel programming / threading / Intel and concurrency. Unfortunately, he also appears to have stopped updating his blog – and of course there is always the POSIX vs. Windows threads disaster. Read this article and the comments below if you want to know what I mean.
Thats it for today, I hope you enjoyed the trip into my newsreader a little. Have I forgotten anything? Its not like there are many blogs about parallel programming available, so if I have missed one, please let me know (and yes, I know about the two once-famous Erlang blogs, but they appear to be dead as well – at least for my definition of dead, which means no updates for more than a month)!
