Brian Goetz, Java Concurrency Author, JSR EG member

Brian Goetz has been a professional software developer for 20 years. He is the author of over 75 articles on software development, and his book, Java Concurrency In Practice, was published in May 2006 by Addison-Wesley.

He serves on the JCP Expert Groups for JSRs 166 (concurrency utilities), 107 (caching), and 305 (annotations for safety analysis).

He is a frequent presenter at JavaOne, OOPSLA, JavaPolis, SDWest, and the No Fluff Just Stuff Software Symposium Tour. Brian is a Sr. Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems.

Presentation: "From Concurrent to Parallel"

Track: Java Emerging Technologies

Time: Thursday 13:00 - 14:00

Location: Metro 1

Abstract:

The world is changing: Multiprocessor systems have gone from being rare and expensive to being ubiquitous. A four-CPU system used to qualify as a big, multiway system--now even inexpensive desktops have four CPU cores.

As the hardware reality changes, so do the programs we want to write and so must the platform and libraries we rely on. The java.util.concurrent package, introduced on the JavaT Platform, Standard Edition 5 (Java SE 5 platform), was a huge step forward, making coarse-grained concurrency much easier. But as processor counts continue to increase, developers are looking for finer-grained concurrency so that they can effectively exploit today's hardware.

On the Java SE 7 platform, the java.util.concurent package will grow to address the need to exploit finer-grained concurrency, in the form of the fork-join framework. Fork-join is a technique for parallel decomposition that has been used in the parallel programming community for many years but that is starting to become relevant for accelerating concurrent applications.

This presentation looks at the fork-join package, how it works, and how to use it, as well as other concurrency improvements on the Java SE 7 platform.