New case studies on Parallel Extensions

Stephen Toub - MSFT

In coordination with today’s launch of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4, several case studies have been published on how companies are taking advantage of parallel computing with the .NET Framework to improve the performance of their applications.  It’s exciting to see the benefits these companies are seeing and how parallelism is so positively affecting their businesses:

ORElogy
Mine-Planning Software Uses Parallelization to Deliver Powerful New Capabilities
“In developing its own mine-planning software, consultancy ORElogy needed to capitalize on the performance gains enabled by multicore processors and multiprocessor servers, but it wanted to avoid having to write a lot of low-level threading code. The company used the parallel-programming aids provided in the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 development system and the .NET Framework 4 to achieve the performance needed to support geologic models consisting of millions of individual blocks of earth—an order of magnitude more than the practical limits imposed by many competing products. Through its use of parallel programming, the company is delivering compelling new capabilities for customers. And because ORElogy is using familiar tools, virtually no additional learning was required to parallelize its code.”

Composite
Content Management Solution Uses Parallelization to Deliver Huge Performance Gains
“Content management system vendor Composite needed to parallelize its software to realize the performance gains enabled by today’s multicore processors. Composite took advantage of the new parallel-programming tools provided in the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 development system and the .NET Framework 4 to parallelize its code. The company’s efforts have yielded impressive performance gains: An eight-core server is delivering a 60 percent reduction in page-rendering times and an 80 percent reduction in the compilation of dynamic types upon system initialization. What’s more, by using the latest Microsoft aids for parallel programming, Composite was able to implement parallelism in its solution quickly and cost-effectively, with very little developer effort.”

Grange Insurance
Insurance Company Uses Parallel Programming to Move Rating Engine off Mainframe
“From 1999 to 2010, Grange Insurance maintained its mission-critical rating engine in two places: a Windows-based Web site for agents, and a mainframe for heavy batch processing. To eliminate duplicate effort, Grange Insurance is consolidating all rating activity onto the Windows Server operating system environment—made possible by using the new parallel-programming aids provided in the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 development system and the .NET Framework 4 to achieve performance gains of up to 750 percent. Consolidation of all rating activity on Windows Server will reduce the company’s annual IT workload by 20,000 hours and decrease cycle times for rate adjustments by two-thirds, from three months to one. The company’s use of Microsoft technology helped developers parallelize the code quickly and easily, with minimal effort and virtually no learning curve.”

Visual Numerics
Numerical Library Provider Realizes Major Performance Gains by Parallelizing Its Code
“Visual Numerics needed a way to efficiently parallelize its C# numerical library software—and thus realized the performance gains made possible by today’s multicore processors. The company continues to improve the performance of its IMSL C# Numerical Libraries by taking advantage of the support for parallel programming provided in the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 development system and the Microsoft .NET Framework 4. This support enables Visual Numerics developers to productively write scalable parallel code at higher levels of abstraction than they could by working directly with threads. The company’s efforts are yielding an almost linear increase in performance on multicore systems, positioning Visual Numerics as an industry leader in meeting the needs of Windows developers working in the field of technical computing.”

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