What We Need Is More Heterogeneity

Current processors offer some variety in the types of computational engines. They consist of multiple identical general purpose cores, embedded multi-core graphics cores (GPUs), and accelerators for video and audio compression. Recently, Intel has integrated Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) into the server-class processors, for even more customizable computational flexibility. Modern CPU’s (Intel, AMD, ARM, […]

Faster Merge in C# and C++

Merging of two pre-sorted arrays into a single array is a core part of the merge sort algorithm. In this blog I’ll discuss a couple of high performance implementations for a serial merge, and a way to reduce the number of comparisons. static public void Merge(int[] a, Int32 aStart, Int32 aEnd, int[] b, Int32 bStart, […]

Faster Sorting in C#

C# has several built-in algorithms for sorting arrays, lists and other containers. Array.Sort and List.Sort have many variations for sorting full or partial containers, using an algorithm that runs on a single CPU core. The Linq library can also sort containers, using a single CPU core or multiple cores in parallel. These are powerful, flexible, […]

High Performance C#

C# is a wonderfully powerful object oriented language with support for many modern constructs, supporting variety of abstractions, managed environment, numerous libraries, with one of the most enjoyable and productive development environments. At each level of abstraction, as one of my friends reminded me, we can loose performance, such as when going from assembly language […]

Source NuGet Packages From Your Local Drive

.NET developers rely on many NuGet packages to extend functionality of the software they create. These NuGet packages can come from variety of NuGet repositories on the web, or corporate intranets. They can also come from the local hard drive on your computer. I’ll show you how to set this up in this blog. Most […]

High Performance Parallel C#

C# provides a powerful set of algorithms for standard containers, such as array and List, when you add “using System.Linq;” statement to your code. Arrays and List containers gain such functionality as Sort, Equal, Sum, Union, Where, Min, Max, First, Last, and so on. For instance, these make it simple to find the minimum element […]

Parallel Algorithms in C#

C# is a wonderful programming language, evolving quickly. Microsoft has pushed C# into parallel programming by adding the Task Parallel Library, simplifying development of efficient parallel algorithms. In this blog I’ll describe the parallel library that I’ve developed, with some excellent preliminary results. Preliminary Performance Results Parallel Sorting is running more than 2X faster than […]

Algorithm Performance