TABLE OF CONTENTS As discussed in the previous chapter, parallel programming makes use of threads to enable two or more operations to proceed in parallel. The entire concept of parallel programming centers on the design, development, and deployment of threads within an application and the coordination between threads and their respective operations. This book will examine all these topics with a special eye to the performance implications of each, especially as they apply to processors endowed with HT Technology.
This chapter examines how to break up traditional programming tasks into chunks that are suitable for threading. It then demonstrates how to create threads, how these threads are typically run on multiprocessing systems, and how threads are run using HT Technology.
Developers unacquainted with parallel programming are generally comfortable with traditional programming models such as single-threaded declarative programs and object-oriented programming (OOP). In both cases, a program begins at a defined point such as main() and works through a series of tasks in succession. If the program relies on user interaction, the main processing instrument is a loop in which user events are handled. From each allowed event a button click, for example an established sequence of actions is performed that ultimately ends with a wait for the next user action.
When designing such programs, developers enjoy a relatively simple programming world because only one thing is happening at any given moment. If program tasks must be scheduled in a specific way, it's because the developer chooses a certain order to the activities,...
