21 Oct 2008 : Life in a Multi-Threaded World 
Soon we will all need to be highly proficient with threading to make full use of all the potential that quad-core and higher CPUs are rapidly bringing to the computing landscape. But writing thread safe code can be tricky stuff. This talk examines in detail the real world experience of building one such highly multi-threaded application, a custom game server written in Java to support an online virtual game world. If you imagine Second Life or World of Warcraft but inside a browser, you're thinking along the right lines.
During the course of building this application, we learned that many of the techniques that worked well when writing small threaded applications were really not sufficient for a large, complex and scalable multi-threaded application. In this talk I'll discuss what problems we encountered and present a specific approach based on combining some concepts taken from Brian Goetz's work together with insights from Herb Sutter (a C++ concurrency guru) that turned things around and provide what I believe is a solid and yet relatively simple basis for building real world, large scale multi-threaded applications.
This is a nuts and bolts presentation, going from the high level concepts of what we were looking to achieve down to the specific implementation details. Since today not everyone has had the chance to write this sort of multi-threaded application from the ground up I hope sharing these insights will help others gain more confidence in writing complex, threaded applications so we can embrace and make better use of the hardware that will soon be upon us.
Spaker Bio
Douglas Pearson is co-founder and CTO of FlowPlay, Inc the makers of ourWorld.com. ourWorld is an online casual virtual world with over half a million users, where you can play games and have fun while earning clothing, furniture and other goodies. FlowPlay is Doug's second startup after founding ThreePenny Software which made mobile casual games for GameHouse and then RealNetworks from 2002-2006. He earned a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Michigan in 1996 and is an ex-pat Brit having crossed the Atlantic for good in 1988. When not building virtual worlds, Doug may often be found playing competitive badminton much to the confusion of his American friends who don't believe such a sport exists.
Pizza and pop will be provided by our gracious hosts -
OpenMarket and
QPass
