YetiSim Blog

Three months since the last post?  Where are you?  Is YetiSim dead, or just one of those projects that starts but never goes anywhere?  Well the short answer is, I’ve taken a strategic retreat to really update my skills to make YetiSim even cooler.  Now with some updated C++ and parallel skills, it’s time to get down to making YetiSim super cool.

On June 2nd, I started my new position at Igor Jurisica’s lab at MaRS.  The nicest part of the job… access to the 395th fastest computer in the world!  I’ve spent the past month settling in, and thinking a lot about how I would extend TBB to a cluster.   I’ve been reading Parallel Programming Using C++ which is a really good book.  Next week I meet with one of the authors of the book to discuss some of my views on the subject, and to get some feedback.  I have also been reading The Art of Multiprocessor Programming which is an excellent book, and worth every penny.  I have also been reading about C++ template programming, including template metaprogramming.

I have been researching parallel data structures, and there is a nice collection of them in The Art of Multiprocessor Programming.  I will be experimenting with the implementation of some new concurrent data structures using TBB very soon, from which YetiSim will benefit.  In addition to new containers, I’m excited to report that my research on template metaprogramming has resulted in potentially huge optimizations within YetiSim.  I am currently researching a method by which I may translate the execution graph directly into C++ code which can be compiled… no more run-time traversal of logic.  I will be reporting on progress on this front as it develops.

In conclusion, a lot of my time has been spent reading and doing research.  Perhaps for some this is a strange way of doing programming.  YetiSim reached a point of stagnation where I was not completely satisfied with the performance and scalability (which was practically non-existent).  Now with new tools at my disposal, progress should resume.  I should also mention that my test server has been ordered, which means that soon I will have a proper test environment for parallel experiments.