Busting Common Myths about Developer Productivity

Many traditional assumptions about software development have been challenged in recent years. Agile processes and service oriented architectures are two examples of this. An area that has seen little real scrutiny is developer productivity. Almost by convention, every new tool, framework or approach promises huge gains in productivity but a coherent view of all factors involved is usually missing. In this talk recorded at Saltmarch Media's Great Indian Developer Summit, Erik Dörnenburg examine several common myths about developer productivity and show that productivity improvements often require a trade-off with other desirable goals. He also discusses the relative impact of some tools and approaches.

Building on his experience with J2EE, Microsoft .NET and other environments, Erik Dörnenburg is continually exploring new patterns of enterprise software. His career in enterprise software began in the early nineties on the NeXTSTEP platform and Erik has been an advocate of agile, test-driven, object-oriented development and Open Source software for many years. Before helping clients with the design and implementation of large-scale enterprise solutions at Thoughtworks Erik was Technical Director at Pixelpark UK, a new media company, where he integrated enterprise systems with web-based solutions and a variety of digital delivery channels.

Over 6500 attendees have benefited from two game changing editions of Great Indian Developer Summit. In 2010, the biggest independent summit for software developers in India is bringing together over 100 sessions encompassing the full range of Microsoft computing, Java, Agile, RIA, Rich Web, open source/standards, languages, frameworks and platforms, practical tutorials that deep dive into technical skill and best practices, inspirational keynote presentations, an Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest projects and products activities, Awards to honor software excellence, engaging networking events, and over 80 of the best and brightest of speakers from around the world. The summit will be held 20-23 April 2010 at the IISc in Bangalore. For further information on GIDS 2010, please visit the summit on the web http://www.developersummit.com/.

Adobe Flash is the Obvious Choice for Game Development, says Harish Sivaramakrishnan at India GDS

The Adobe Flash Platform is the leading platform in the world for developing games on the web and devices says Harish Sivaramakrishnan, a Computer Scientist at Adobe Systems. Harish is immensely passionate about anything pertaining to Adobe Flash, Flex and other platform technologies. He is a hardcore UI / UX enthusiast and strongly believes that building great user experiences is the key for the success of any application. He has worked in the Flex Engineering team @Macromedia and Adobe for the Flex 2.0 – Flex 3.0 releases, and in the Adobe Media Player team implementing the Digital Rights Management features to AMP (now known as OSMF).

Harish spoke to Saltmarch Media about the reasons for which the Adobe Flash platform is so popular for developing games on the Web and mobile, the packager option that Adobe has for Flash developers in order to help them develop applications in Flash and to port them onto the iPhone and the NVIDIA-Adobe partnership to develop GPU accelerated Flash. He also shared his thoughts on the fastest growing places for game development, words of wisdom for startup game development companies and the main skills Indian game developers should equip themselves with to gain a sizable share of the global game development work.

Q. Please introduce yourself to our readership and and tell us how a Chemical Engineer from the Birla Institute of Technology & Science in Pilani became a flexgeek?

My name is Harish Sivaramakrishnan and I work as a computer scientist and platform evangelist for Adobe Systems. I have a day job that requires me to speak to the developer community and basically tell them about how cool our technologies are and find out what is and what’s not working for them. I used to dabble with a little bit of programming when I was in college while trying to do some automation work for some of the chemical processes and that’s how I got started.

By the time I graduated 10 years ago people were finding software jobs irrespective of what they studied so I got placed in one of the large MNCs with a nice five–digit salary and that really helped me make a decision at that point in time. Honestly speaking, that’s how I ended up in software but then I realized through the years as to the potential of the software industry and I stayed on without ever feeling the need to go back. It’s not an elaborately different story and it’s the same as any average college student who comes out of college and gets hooked into the software industry.

Q. What, in your opinion, are the reasons for which the Adobe Flash platform is so popular for developing games on the Web and mobile?

Adobe Flash is a mature 10+ year legacy technology so it’s not an innovation that we started one or two years ago. We have spent many years innovating on that technology and what it has really translated to is that 99% of all connected PCs have Flash players running on their systems. So for a game developer who’s trying to build a game and trying to get it distributed to people, it fails me to think of a better medium than the Flash platform because it’s one platform through which you can be quite sure your product is going to reach your target audience. The runtime makes a huge difference and Flash’s runtime availability is fantastic.

On the flipside, if you look at the tooling we have for developing games, we are far ahead of the tooling that comes for casual gaming. Of course this is not so for some of the serious gaming that’s not web specific where it’s a different story all together. But pertaining to the Web – the Flash Professional CS 4 and Shockwave and other tools that Adobe has been building for years, are immensely popular and has made many enterprises successful in building games. So I think it is the tooling coupled with the very popular runtime that’s widely accepted and distributed that makes Adobe a very obvious choice as a platform to building games.

Q. Can you tell us in brief about the packager option Adobe has for Flash developers, to help them develop applications in Flash and to port them onto the iPhone?

Adobe recently announced a way by which developers working on Adobe Flash can continue to build on Flash and port those applications to run on Apple’s phone. So the Adobe Creative Suite 5 allows you to build applications using your favorite tools and Action Script and you can package it to run as a native application on an iPhone. This enables all Flash developers to continue to use the tools that they love and tools that they are familiar with and target Apple’s runtime on iPhone. That software is in a pre–release right now and we’re hearing some really good things about it.

Q. Can you tell us a bit about the NVIDIA–Adobe partnership to develop GPU accelerated Flash?

Recently there has been a lot of developments on what NVIDIA has done to help and develop Flash to perform better. The QUADRA that NVIDIA has right now helps Flash to perform far better on all possible environments. It is excellent that such a partnership exists and users of both Adobe and NVIDIA technologies are now reaping the benefits that they get from better performance across the usage.

Q. In your opinion, which are the fastest growing places for game development at the moment?

If I look at casual gaming I see a great expansion. I personally work with folks in China and Japan where they have localized gaming for their own community. Some of their games might not really make too much of a differentiation to folks outside these countries but they have their own set of games that they build and there’s enormous opportunity in China and Japan.

I notice that even in India we are taking largely to casual gaming and social gaming. Almost everyone I know is playing Farmville on Facebook. So there’s a growth of people playing games in this country.

Looking at India Game Developer Summit 2010 (Lit Ed.), the buzz that I’m seeing and judging by the number of people who turned up for my talk, I think it is seriously happening in India as well. It is growing in a very big way over here and I had an interaction with a couple of the companies and I think we are coming up in a significant way in terms of game development. I think, generally, the emerging markets, as they call it, holds a lot of promises.

Q. Do you have any words of wisdom for startup game development companies?

What I’ve seen is the whole ecosystem is now changing with respect to the Web being a part of our regular life. The Web is now accessible, and not just on PCs but on mobile devices, tablets, refrigerators and even car consoles, and is much more of a democratic medium. So Internet has really changed the spectrum of how games get developed and delivered.

My impression is that unless you develop games to have a viral transaction across all forms of Web it’s going to be hard in the days to come. Keeping the social angle intact, building games that will keep people engaged, identifying the right audience for your games – I always take the example of cricket – I believe that any cricketing game is going to be lapped up and if that’s the case then it should be targeted to a country where cricket is appreciated.

So if you are building casual games I think the target should be specific in terms of where you can really find distribution, where you can really find audience and where you are confident of making money out of a gaming business because ultimately people want everything for free.

As a guy who’s playing a game I really don’t want to pay but on a serious context, monetization is very important so is identifying the right pockets to invest your games in.  Break out of the conventional wisdom of building games just for the Web.

Creating your own web site might not be the only way to circulate your games so keep your eyes open. Social media and Web 2.0 provide big opportunities. I believe that anything that forgets the presence of social media might not be taking a very confident step. If you are factoring that in then the business is hot and you can get some good stuff going.

Q. What, in your opinion are the main skills Indian game developers should equip themselves with to gain a sizable share of the global game development work?

This question has multiple manifestations. Game development, however trivial people may make it sound like, is serious engineering. The blood and sweat an engineer puts behind getting a great game out into the market is as complex as an enterprise application.

We have some very senior accomplished game shops in India and they’re doing a great job in mentoring the new ones. Whenever I meet some new programmers who’re taking to game development what I tell them is, you need to understand your user in order to create a good gaming experience. It is not always about engineering a game but understanding the whole humanness of a game which can then be translated by several programming concepts like physics engines, inverse kinematics, implementing bones, implementing perspectives etc.

So it is not just about the theory of 3D perspectives and the theory about kinematics but what is more important is to apply that to the screen you are catering to. So building a mobile game is probably very different from building a tablet game and a PC game.

What I usually see in people is that – game development is seen as a simple programming exercise and building something which is to the specifications. I feel gaming is more of an imaginative process. You need to think if you would really want to play the game you are building. All talented engineers will go through this phase of how to get a program to run in a way that the user would like it. So a user–experience based approach is very important. Performance and size of the game are also important and should not be discounted but at the end what really matters is if the game and game play looks attractive to the person who is using it. That, in my opinion, should be paramount.

It all comes down to choosing the right platform, technologies, libraries and engines. So keep your eyes open and do not get bogged down to one particular stack or one particular line of working. This will not result in imaginative games but games that just work.

To summarise I would say that gaming is no different from engineering so all the engineering stuff that you do directly apply to gaming, but gaming is far more fun and far more imaginative.

Q. What are Adobe's ambitions for the next five years with respect to the gaming industry?

We have been building these tools and runtimes which are definitely helping game developers and publishers. So our tools and runtimes have time and again proved to be very successful for developers and we remain committed to continue to innovate our tools and runtimes to make it more conducive and helpful to game developers so that they can actually take it to the next level.

For example, the Fash player 10.1, which is in beta right now, has got extended features like accelerometer support and geolocation, multitouch and things that are very commonly used in gaming context. We also have optimixation for mobile so application development for mobile gets far more easier. We are in the process of disruptively innovating and helping our customers. We will remain committed and focused and will work very actively with the community and we will listen to what they want.

We believe that the game developers and publishers will benefit from the innovations we do and we will do our best to keep the ecosystem going forward. And the success of the community defines the success of Adobe and we value their success in a very big way. Flash player is a ubiquitous runtime today and we believe we will do innovations to keep it that way and provide features that allow people to do far more than what they do currently.

.NET Gotchas Workshop by Venkat Subramaniam: Part III

Programmers working on the .NET framework know the power and increased productivity that comes with it, says Dr. Venkat Submramaniam. Like any development, however, there are things that one should pay attention to while programming on .NET. Are there things in .NET that, if we do not pay attention to, may result in more trouble than it is worth? Find out in the third part of this 180-minute Workshop recorded at Saltmarch Media's Great Indian Developer Summit.

In this workshop, Dr. Venkat Subramaniam presents Gotchas that a developer needs to know to be productive in the .NET framework. The issues addressed include framework, language, language interoperability, COM interoperability. Most Gotchas are language independent while a few are C# or VB.NET specific.

In the summer of 2010, Dr. Venkat Subramaniam will be back at Great Indian Developer Summit to conduct focused conference sessions, a keynote and a workshop on topics ranging from F# and .NET CLR, effective Java, testing with dependencies, design patterns in Groovy and Java, Java Generics in version 1.5, functional programming to pointy haired bosses and pragmatic programmers.

Over 6500 attendees have benefited from two game changing editions of Great Indian Developer Summit. In 2010, the biggest independent summit for software developers in India is bringing together over 100 sessions encompassing the full range of Microsoft computing, Java, Agile, RIA, Rich Web, open source/standards, languages, frameworks and platforms, practical tutorials that deep dive into technical skill and best practices, inspirational keynote presentations, an Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest projects and products activities, Awards to honor software excellence, engaging networking events, and over 80 of the best and brightest of speakers from around the world. The summit will be held 20-23 April 2010 at the IISc in Bangalore. For further information on GIDS 2010, please visit the summit on the web http://www.developersummit.com/.

Silverlight Deep Dive Workshop by Todd Anglin: Part III

Do you want to truly understand Silverlight? If so, do not miss this three-hour workshop that will cover everything from Silverlight basics to advanced topics like cross-site XHR. In the third part of the Workshop recorded at Saltmarch Media's Great Indian Developer Summit, Telerik's Todd Anglin he looks at more advanced Silverlight topics like building custom UI controls and managing security. You will leave this workshop with a complete understanding of Silverlight and how you can use it to build real applications.

During the first hour of the workshop, Todd examines the history of Silverlight, study its importance as a technology, and look at the tools available for building Silverlight applications. In the second hour of the workshop he dives deeper and begins building simple Silverlight applications that show-off key features like .NET support and DOM manipulation.

In the summer of 2010, Stephen Forte, Chief Strategy Officer of Telerik, and Mehfuz Hossain, a core member at Telerik Corporation, will be at Great Indian Developer Summit to conduct focused conference sessions and a workshop on topics ranging from Business Intelligence design patterns and Microsoft Excel's PowerPivot 2010, sharing code between Silverlight and .NET using C#, Visual Basic and more, building line of business applications with Silverlight 4.0, developing with the Windows API code pack for Microsoft .NET framework, extending Visual Studio 2010 With Managed Addin Framework, and a workshop that will give you a jump start in taking the scrum master certification exam and adopting Agile project management and development methods.

Over 6500 attendees have benefited from two game changing editions of Great Indian Developer Summit. In 2010, the biggest independent summit for software developers in India is bringing together over 100 sessions encompassing the full range of Microsoft computing, Java, Agile, RIA, Rich Web, open source/standards, languages, frameworks and platforms, practical tutorials that deep dive into technical skill and best practices, inspirational keynote presentations, an Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest projects and products activities, Awards to honor software excellence, engaging networking events, and over 80 of the best and brightest of speakers from around the world. The summit will be held 20-23 April 2010 at the IISc in Bangalore. For further information on GIDS 2010, please visit the summit on the web http://www.developersummit.com/.

.NET Gotchas Workshop: Part II

There are several things that one should pay attention to while programming on .NET, says Dr. Venkat Submramaniam. Are there things in .NET that, if we do not pay attention to, may result in more trouble than it is worth? Learn more in the second part of the Workshop recorded at Saltmarch Media's Great Indian Developer Summit. In the second part of this three-hour Workshop, Dr. Venkat Subramaniam presents Gotchas that a developer needs to know to be productive in the .NET framework. The issues addressed include framework, language, language interoperability, COM interoperability. Most Gotchas are language independent while a few are C# or VB.NET specific.

In the summer of 2010, Dr. Venkat Subramaniam will be back at Great Indian Developer Summit to conduct focused conference sessions, a keynote and a workshop on topics ranging from F# and .NET CLR, effective Java, testing with dependencies, design patterns in Groovy and Java, Java Generics in version 1.5, functional programming to pointy haired bosses and pragmatic programmers.

Over 6500 attendees have benefited from two game changing editions of Great Indian Developer Summit. In 2010, the biggest independent summit for software developers in India is bringing together over 100 sessions encompassing the full range of Microsoft computing, Java, Agile, RIA, Rich Web, open source/standards, languages, frameworks and platforms, practical tutorials that deep dive into technical skill and best practices, inspirational keynote presentations, an Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest projects and products activities, Awards to honor software excellence, engaging networking events, and over 80 of the best and brightest of speakers from around the world. The summit will be held 20-23 April 2010 at the IISc in Bangalore. For further information on GIDS 2010, please visit the summit on the web http://www.developersummit.com/.

Silverlight Deep Dive Workshop: Part II

Do you want to truly understand Silverlight? If so, do not miss this three-hour workshop that will cover everything from Silverlight basics to advanced topics like cross-site XHR. In the second part of the Workshop recorded at Saltmarch Media's Great Indian Developer Summit., Telerik's Todd Anglin dives deeper and begins building simple Silverlight applications that show-off key features like .NET support and DOM manipulation.

During the first hour of the workshop, Todd examines the history of Silverlight, study its importance as a technology, and look at the tools available for building Silverlight applications. In the third hour, he looks at more advanced Silverlight topics like building custom UI controls and managing security. You will leave this workshop with a complete understanding of Silverlight and how you can use it to build real applications.

In the summer of 2010, Stephen Forte, Chief Strategy Officer of Telerik, and Mehfuz Hossain, a core member at Telerik Corporation, will be at Great Indian Developer Summit to conduct focused conference sessions and a workshop on topics ranging from Business Intelligence design patterns and Microsoft Excel's PowerPivot 2010, sharing code between Silverlight and .NET using C#, Visual Basic and more, building line of business applications with Silverlight 4.0, developing with the Windows API code pack for Microsoft .NET framework, extending Visual Studio 2010 With Managed Addin Framework, and a workshop that will give you a jump start in taking the scrum master certification exam and adopting Agile project management and development methods.

Over 6500 attendees have benefited from two game changing editions of Great Indian Developer Summit. In 2010, the biggest independent summit for software developers in India is bringing together over 100 sessions encompassing the full range of Microsoft computing, Java, Agile, RIA, Rich Web, open source/standards, languages, frameworks and platforms, practical tutorials that deep dive into technical skill and best practices, inspirational keynote presentations, an Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest projects and products activities, Awards to honor software excellence, engaging networking events, and over 80 of the best and brightest of speakers from around the world. The summit will be held 20-23 April 2010 at the IISc in Bangalore. For further information on GIDS 2010, please visit the summit on the web http://www.developersummit.com/.

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam's .NET Gotchas Workshop: Part I

Those of us programming on the .NET framework have come to realize the power and increased productivity that comes with it, says Dr. Venkat Submramaniam. Like any development, however, there are things that one should pay attention to while programming on .NET. Are there things in .NET that, if we do not pay attention to, may result in more trouble than it is worth? Find out in the first part of the 180-minute Workshop recorded at Saltmarch Media's Great Indian Developer Summit.

In this workshop, Dr. Venkat Subramaniam presents Gotchas that a developer needs to know to be productive in the .NET framework. The issues addressed include framework, language, language interoperability, COM interoperability. Most Gotchas are language independent while a few are C# or VB.NET specific.

In the summer of 2010, Dr. Venkat Subramaniam will be back at Great Indian Developer Summit to conduct focused conference sessions, a keynote and a workshop on topics ranging from F# and .NET CLR, effective Java, testing with dependencies, design patterns in Groovy and Java, Java Generics in version 1.5, functional programming to pointy haired bosses and pragmatic programmers.

Over 6500 attendees have benefited from two game changing editions of Great Indian Developer Summit. In 2010, the biggest independent summit for software developers in India is bringing together over 100 sessions encompassing the full range of Microsoft computing, Java, Agile, RIA, Rich Web, open source/standards, languages, frameworks and platforms, practical tutorials that deep dive into technical skill and best practices, inspirational keynote presentations, an Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest projects and products activities, Awards to honor software excellence, engaging networking events, and over 80 of the best and brightest of speakers from around the world. The summit will be held 20-23 April 2010 at the IISc in Bangalore. For further information on GIDS 2010, please visit the summit on the web http://www.developersummit.com/.

Todd Anglin's Silverlight Deep Dive Workshop: Part I

Do you want to truly understand Silverlight? If so, do not miss this three-hour workshop that will cover everything from Silverlight basics to advanced topics like cross-site XHR. During the first part of the Workshop recorded at Saltmarch Media's Great Indian Developer Summit., Telerik's Todd Anglin examines the history of Silverlight, study its importance as a technology, and look at the tools available for building Silverlight applications.

In the second hour, Todd dives deeper and begins building simple Silverlight applications that show-off key features like .NET support and DOM manipulation. Finally, in the third hour, he looks at more advanced Silverlight topics like building custom UI controls and managing security. You will leave this workshop with a complete understanding of Silverlight and how you can use it to build real applications.

In the summer of 2010, Stephen Forte, Chief Strategy Officer of Telerik, and Mehfuz Hossain, a core member at Telerik Corporation, will be at Great Indian Developer Summit to conduct focused conference sessions and a workshop on topics ranging from Business Intelligence design patterns and Microsoft Excel's PowerPivot 2010, sharing code between Silverlight and .NET using C#, Visual Basic and more, building line of business applications with Silverlight 4.0, developing with the Windows API code pack for Microsoft .NET framework, extending Visual Studio 2010 With Managed Addin Framework, and a workshop that will give you a jump start in taking the scrum master certification exam and adopting Agile project management and development methods.

Over 6500 attendees have benefited from two game changing editions of Great Indian Developer Summit. In 2010, the biggest independent summit for software developers in India is bringing together over 100 sessions encompassing the full range of Microsoft computing, Java, Agile, RIA, Rich Web, open source/standards, languages, frameworks and platforms, practical tutorials that deep dive into technical skill and best practices, inspirational keynote presentations, an Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest projects and products activities, Awards to honor software excellence, engaging networking events, and over 80 of the best and brightest of speakers from around the world. The summit will be held 20-23 April 2010 at the IISc in Bangalore. For further information on GIDS 2010, please visit the summit on the web http://www.developersummit.com/.

Need More Developer Heroes for India, says Intel

Over the last few years, the defining paradigm in computing performance has shifted inexorably from raw clock speed to parallel operations and energy efficiency. Saltmarch spoke to Narendra Bhandari, the Director for Asia Pacific of the Intel Software and Services Group - Developer Relations Division at Intel, to find out how industry participants are adapting to this change. Narendra also speaks on a multititude of topics such as multi-threaded application development, enhancing the end user experience, Larrabee - the new instantiation of Intel architecture designed for highly parallel throughput applications like gaming, that is expected to compete with GeForce and Radeon products from NVIDIA and AMD respectively. He also provides insights into Intel’s forthcoming innovations in products and software that will create opportunities for the developer community to quickly grow and expand their business. Read the complete interview.

Q. Can you introduce yourself to our audience and tell us in a bit about your role at Intel?

I manage the Asia Pacific portion of the group called Software and Services Group (SSG). It is a group within Intel which is focused at making sure that software developers can be more productive and can produce innovative applications on top of hardware, which we produce that is used by our customers. So the focus is to get developers to be productive, get them to use maximum amount of features from the hardware and then get them to produce more innovative applications on top of our hardware.

Q. SSG, unlike virtually all other Intel groups, has teams focused on almost all aspects of Intel platforms. Can you tell us about how SSG is adding value to the platform and ecosystem and why SSG as a group is critical to Intel's plans going forward?

Sure. The SSG basically goes with the value proposition of helping X86 across the board. If you look at it, right from Xeon which is used for servers, all the way down to the Atom processor which is used for smaller devices, we have an x86 instruction set that is compatible from top to bottom. Now this is critical for developers as they can build applications on one platform and at least have availability on other platforms. It may not be completely optimised, but at least have the capability to run it on multiple platforms. What our group does is help build tools and provide a set of frameworks and applications so developers can build applications and have a continuum of applications. From a platform ecosystem perspective we make sure that various other components such as Operating System and middleware are well optimised to take advantage of the hardware features below. The benefit of that is that many of the developers don’t get to mess with the hardware anymore. Nobody writes assembly anymore so we make sure that the layers between the application and the hardware are well optimised so the developers can write on top of the API and take advantage of the hardware features.

Q. Over the last few years, the defining paradigm in computing performance has shifted inexorably from raw clock speed to parallel operations and energy efficiency. What is the feedback you are getting from industry participants who have moved to adapt to this change?

Let’s step back and think as to why it has happened. If you think about it, it is largely driven by the consumers. As a consumer you want to be mobile. You want to carry your data with you. You want to carry your music with you. From a consumer perspective and from a business perspective, you want to carry your applications, e-mail, contacts etc. with you. Now when you are mobile, you want battery life. You want the device to be running at least full day of your usage. And once that started people also wanted performance. You cannot have a mobile device that takes three seconds to look up a contact name because you want it almost instantly. And when a call comes and you press the button you want the voice to come instantly.

So you want the performance and you want the battery life. To balance that, the devices have over time taken to techniques that provide energy efficiency.

Performance can come from two things. One is driving up the clock speed but as we drive up the clock speed, the power consumption increases which is not good for mobile devices like smartphones, notebooks, laptops and devices that largely depend on battery for their usage.

If we increase the clock speed on these devices, the energy efficiency is not very good and the battery runs out very fast. You will get performance but the battery drains out pretty fast.

Many years ago, the approach taken by almost all processor vendors in the industry was to say, “What if in addition to the straight line performance we introduced parallel execution engines. Dual core was the start and now you see multi-core processors coming out in the market. Now once the hardware became parallel, you had to make sure that the software has the ability to take advantage of the multiple execution units or multiple cores in the platform.

Parallelism has been in the industry for many years, in different forms, but when we came out with Pentium 4 with hyper threading, people started to parallelize their application but it was one processor unit running two or three threads of execution. However, as we got into multiple cores the application designers and developers had the flexibility to design more number of threads which could potentially run on these platforms and this gives us increased performance and the clock speed can remain constant or even lower and you get energy efficiency and performance. So from an end user perspective, we get better battery life. From a developer perspective, they can take advantage of the hardware and provide energy efficiency.

Q. Would it be correct to assume that performance enhancements are increasingly becoming dependent on multithreading and that is simply the most effective way to produce gains in application behavior?

Almost 90% of the processors we ship today support parallelism and many of them actually have multiple cores. So when you have the hardware able to run two cores simultaneously, four in the higher end machines, four and six in the server side, Parallelism is one of the most effective ways to drive performance on these architectures. Now the straight line performance has also improved due to our micro architectural improvements. But if you want scaleable performance, threading is right now the most effective way.

Q. What advances are we seeing in tools to enhance multi-threaded application development and what is Intel doing to help parallel software developers keep pace with emerging multi-core architectures?

Let’s take two scenarios. One is somebody is taking an existing application and trying to make it parallel. There are data structures, algorithms, validation techniques and all that needs to be taken care of to move from a straight line application to a multi threaded application. The other scenario could be that you are designing from scratch, where you take a bunch of libraries, put them together but the architecture of the code is coming from scratch. In both these scenarios you do need to test, debug and validate at the end. So Intel has software tools at every stage of the pipeline. We have something called Parallel Studio. Studio implies that we have a suite of tools which help you at different stages of the pipeline. Compilers will produce very efficient code and then there are other tools in previous stages of pipeline to help the developers to be productive in architecting, verifying and debugging the code and of course generating very efficient parallel computing programs.

Q. Part of the challenge with helping advance multi-threaded application development appears to be educating and supporting developers to master this technology. How is Intel approaching this challenge?

We provide the tools that integrate well into the developer environment which the developers are used to already. For example, Microsoft Visual Studio or similar environments. We thought to integrate these tools into those environments so that they can continue to be productive as they have trained themselves in those IDEs, and then they use our tools, compliers etc. from that. So that once you know making sure that the transition for the developer is not significant.

The other approach we took was that we said, “Let’s go work with the top infrastructure players. For example, Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe etc. are all relatively base players and whose applications and software is used across millions of machines around the world. We first spent time with them understanding how to optimise the base applications including databases, middleware, manage run time engines like Java. NET, and many of the open source components and ingredients, making sure that they have the ability to take advantage of the multi core hardware. Then we went to the software application companies who are leaders in the various segments -- financial, media, accounting or high performance computing applications -- and dedicated our engineers and gave them hardware to test and take advantage of the multi core feature and got the key applications used across the globe to become multi threaded. At the very least we provided them the training.

The final stage is that we have online communities where developers can get code samples, get SDKs, peer learning, case studies. All this is available for the worldwide developer base -- the key infrastructure players, the key application players and of course the wide base of software developers  -- to take advantage of and to increase their capability at every layer.. We can’t send our engineers to every software company in the world so we make sure they have access to the online resources. Plus we do a series of trainings online, offline, chats, webinars so that people can learn from the others sitting at the comfort of their desk, people can gain the expertise or at least build the confidence in their mind that, “Yes this is pretty easy to do and I have the help I need”.

Q. Specific to our application developer audience, are you able to provide updates on the tools and technologies available to help ensure their visual applications can be optimized on Intel platforms and thereby enhance the end user experience?

The keyword there is visual applications right. Visual applications or visual computing needs the maximum amount of computing to provide a better visual experience. All these are extremely compute intensive task. Also the human eyes see them, and we can detect flaws easily. We can look at something and say, "oh that’s a poor animation" because you know our eyes detect that easily and even a common person can say that didn't look very real. So it's an extremely challenging task for developers in visual computing. Many of the tools I mentioned earlier hold good for the visual computing community also but we also have a visual Adrenalin program targeted towards people who build visual computing type applications. For existing applications which will be based on core and also applications which will potentially come out when Larrabee hits the market over the quarters.

Q. How is Intel's work with universities to provide enhanced training in threading in undergraduate programming courses progressing?

We realize that it’s not just the developers of today but the developers of the future, who are coming out of the universities, who also need to understand the essentials of parallel programming. Once they are well trained on the fundamentals and essentials of parallel programming, it is easy for them to take advantage of dual core, quad core and many core architecture become much easier. They don’t have to ‘unlearn’ straight line programming and then get into parallel programming if we can introduce elements of parallel programming into their course.

Over the years the approach we took was to reach out to the graduate students first. There are around 300 institutions in India that teach parallel programming at some level. At the under graduate program it is a little bit tougher as you need to influence the people who set the curriculum. And since it is a four-year program, the decision making cycles are different in different universities. So we are working with systems through out the world. For instance, in Bangalore (India), we work with Vishweshwarya Technological University (VTU). The undergraduate level will take some time because of the cycles I mentioned earlier. Senior professors in the university are helping to develop the curriculum. So while we bring in the technology, it is great to hear from professors who tell us how to go about with the course design.

Q. Can you tell us what’s new with Larrabee, the new instantiation of Intel architecture designed for highly parallel throughput applications like gaming?

Larrabee is a code name. The software kit and some early samples of the hardware have been provided to a variety of media and gaming companies across the globe. We have also provided a graphics environment, which is like a debugging environment that allows these graphics developers to take the maximum advantage of visual computing features of Larrabee. Larrabee is also very important because it truly is a many core processor. Typically mainstream cores are 2, 4, 6 today, but Larrabee goes into much higher numbers. So scaling of the code has to be significant. There are tools available in the graphics kit that allow you to do pretty high levels of scaling and there are multiple modes provided to program. Not everybody is going to write directly into the metal as we call it. They might use different layers, for example, directX from Microsoft or openGl from the open standard and potentially over time as openCl as it becomes mature. We will see layers in between that will be supported on the Larrabee platform also.

Q. Can you share with us Intel’s forthcoming innovations in products and software that will create opportunities for the developer community to quickly grow and expand their business?

The area which seems to be growing from devices perspective is the mobile devices part. A variety of mobile devices, netbooks and smartphones are growing across the globe in terms of volume.

The nature of Indian consumers is also changing such that they are making more online purchases. The success of application stores is already being demonstrated in many of the mature markets. The paradigm for the developer community is to understand the consumer buying pattern and build applications for it. For developers I would say it is about build for multiple platforms using standard architecture.

Mobile devices are a huge volume including netbooks which a volume leader right now. We are also talking to people about how developers can take advantage of the worldwide opportunity. We have launched the Intel Atom Developer Program focused on building applications for atom based devices. Initially the focus will be on netbooks as it is already there in the market.

Another important thing is that we are focusing on the developer-developer connection. Say, if I want to build an application, without having deep detail of the codecs, hardware and such, I can still build an application using the industry standard components.

Thus the focus is to make the life of the developer more productive. They do not need to build everything from scratch. There will be semblances of engineering validations, testing done through the program so that the person putting together the program gets a sense that many of the technological aspects that he does not know have been taken care of.

So I think it is pretty exciting for developers as they get a chance to have worldwide impact. They can use others components as well as contribute to applications that others are building. For more information about the Intel® AtomTM Developer Program visit www.appdeveloper.intel.com.

Q. What is your vision for Intel SSG in India? Is there anything else that you'd like to share with our audience?

I strongly believe -- at least from the India perspective -- we have an extremely large, mature and growing developer population doing a variety of software programming and services for the Indian as well as the global market. My vision, objective and passion is to make these developers healthy and wealthy -- healthy from a technological perspective and wealthy to make sure they do more innovation. Whatever we need to do in the form of trainings, infrastructure, business opportunities etc. we will continue to provide. My vision is to make sure that our organization continues to make the developers of this country more productive, more technologically competent and, hopefully, produce lots of heroes from here. For more information about Intel® Software Network visit www.intel.com/software.

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