Brad Waters | Development Manager, Microsoft

Brad Waters is a Development Manager in the Windows Core Fundamentals Development Team focusing on multi-core performance and scalability as well as the Windows kernel. Brad joined Microsoft in 1995 with the primary goal of improving Windows NT scalability and performance enabling Windows to be used efficiently in all major server scenarios. Brad is currently leading the Microsoft multi-core virtual team working with key architects, researchers and developers at Microsoft to prepare for future multi-core systems as well as leading efforts to continually improve Windows Server scalability and performance.

Brad has a Masters degree in Computer Science from New York University and a Bachelor degree in Computer Science from North Carolina State University. Brad has worked in software engineering field for over 25 years at Microsoft, Digital Equipment Corp, A Large Commercial Bank in NYC, The City of New York, IBM and ITT Telecommunications.

A new era of computing is now upon us with the pervasive use of multi-core processors. A variety of physical factors such as power, heat and instruction level parallelism limitations resulted in a leveling of single stream processor performance. Meanwhile, the cost per logical gate in microprocessors has continued to decrease which helped enable the architecture of multiple cores on a single processing socket. Dual-core processors for Windows systems were introduced in 2005 and already account for a large percentage of microprocessors sold today. Multi-core processors encourage new strategies that rely on software adapted to multiple streams of processing activity at both the system and application levels providing new opportunities to improve scalability.

In this talk, I will address multi-core challenges and opportunities that face the software industry. I will discuss techniques that improve multi-core server scalability. A methodology to analyze concurrency of application interactions is discussed to help identify domains that have the most potential to leverage vast resources contained in multi-core systems. I will also present my views on future application domains that may be enabled by the computing power of multi-core systems. Finally, I will discuss potential trends and technologies that are expected to evolve in the multi-core era.