Sangam 2011

I recently visited bangalore to speak about Java Concurrency and a different set of problems like ‘False Sharing’, CAS instructions etc. Even model checkers like Java Path Finder was in the agenda. I spent quite a number of hours on the slides and the white paper. On the whole it was enlightening to investigate how Java programs are affected by multiple cores and shared memory and cache coherency.

The turnout for the conference was extremely poor but this affected only the Java tracks. It seems that the Java user groups in India are sometimes at loggerheads with each other and oneupmanship is not uncommon among the JUG’s.

I was mainly interested in the way Java problems perform on multi-core systems because there are so many tutorials on the net that show examples of other more common Java API’s. Hard problems like concurrency have their own attraction because we do not generally profile and investigate our commercial applications using Java Path Finder.

I am happy that I learnt quite a lot about relaxed memory models, java.util.concurrent and many other such topics. There is more to write about later in the blog about all this.