Hotsos Symposium 2006

My goodness, nearly a week without a blog posting and my review of Jonathan’s book still hasn’t appeared. It’s been a crazy week at work and what little spare time I’ve had has been spent on getting my server installed. It looks like I won’t be able to get wireless access working but otherwise it’s going well.

I received some good news today :-

Congratulations, the following presentation(s) have been accepted for the Hotsos Symposium 2006 agenda

60-minute slot: Doug Burns � How Many Slaves? (Parallel Execution and the Magic of Two)

I’m really pleased about this for a couple of reasons. First, I’ve been keen to attend this event for a few years and this way I get my registration fee waived. I’m expecting to learn a lot of new technical information and hear other perspectives.

Second, I’m delighted with a 60 minute slot. Although it’s much easier to keep an audience’s attention for 45 minutes, it can be difficult to do justice to a technical subject and I had resigned myself to covering smaller subjects.

Finally, it gives me a deadline to work towards, which is always a good thing when I’m doing this for my own entertainment and education. Otherwise it would be too easy for other things to come first.

Anyway, here’s the abstract. It was largely inspired by editorial comments to the PX paper I did last year and related conversations I had later.

“How Many Slaves? (Parallel Execution and the Magic of Two)

Several sources have suggested to me that the Magic of Two, as described by Cary Millsap, comes into play when setting the best degree of parallelism. This presentation will test various degrees of parallelism against different hardware configurations to investigate what factors should be considered when choosing an appropriate DOP.”