Microsoft has just released the Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework June 2008 CTP. This is the second CTP release, the first one was released on 11/29/2007. According to Microsoft, Parallel Extensions is:
A managed programming model for data parallelism, task parallelism, and coordination on parallel hardware unified by a common work scheduler.
How is it helpful?
Parallel Extensions makes it easier for developers to write programs that scale to take advantage of parallel hardware by providing improved performance as the numbers of cores and processors increase without having to deal with many of the complexities of today’s concurrent programming models.
The June 2008 CTP contains the following improvements among others:
A new API named Coordination Data Structures which synchronizes and coordinates reads and writes from multiple processes. This API was being used internally by PLINQ and the Task Parallel Library, and now was made available externally.
There is a new run-time scheduler which is supposed to provide the performance scalability needed in the future. The run-time scheduler is a vital and critical part of an operating system or a framework like Parallel Extensions and will most probably need to be optimized based on user feedback.
Various changes to PLINQ like Parallel.Invoke instead of Parallel.Do.
The Parallel Extensions framework is supported on Windows Server 2003, Vista, and XP. The .NET Framework 3.5 is necessary to run the corresponding code, and Visual Studio 2008 for development.