Multicore Application Programming: for Windows, Linux, and Oracle Solaris

by Darryl Gove

Overview

Write High-Performance, Highly-Scalable Multicore Applications for Any Leading Hardware and OS Environment

 

Programmers who know how to leverage today’s multicore processors can achieve remarkable performance improvements, but multicore programming has traditionally been viewed as complex and difficult. Multicore Application Programming is the solution: a comprehensive, practical guide to high-performance multicore programming that any experienced developer can use.

 

Author Darryl Gove covers all leading approaches to virtualization on multiple leading platforms, including Linux, Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X, and Windows. Through practical examples, he illuminates the challenges involved in writing applications that fully utilize multicore features, helping you produce applications that are functionally correct, offer superior performance, and scale well to eight cores, sixteen cores, and beyond.

 

Gove reveals how specific hardware implementations impact application performance and shows how to avoid common potential programming pitfalls. Step by step, you’ll write applications that can handle large numbers of parallel threads, and you’ll master today’s most advanced parallelization techniques. You’ll learn how to:

• Identify your best opportunities to use parallelism
• Share data safely between multiple threads
• Write applications using POSIX or Windows threads
• Take advantage of automatic parallelization and OpenMP
• Hand-code synchronization and sharing
• Overcome common obstacles to scaling
• Apply new approaches to writing correct, fast, scalable parallel code

Multicore Application Programming isn’t wedded to a single approach or platform: It is for every experienced C programmer working with any contemporary multicore processor in any leading operating system environment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780321711410
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	11/09/2010
Series:	Developer's Library
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	464
File size:	18 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Darryl Gove is a senior principal software engineer in the Oracle Solaris Studio compiler team. He works on the analysis, parallelization, and optimization of both applications and benchmarks. Darryl has a master’s degree and a doctorate in operational research from the University of Southampton, UK. He is the author of the books Solaris Application Programming (Prentice Hall, 2008) and The Developer’s Edge (Sun Microsystems, 2009). He writes regularly about optimization and coding and maintains a blog at www.darrylgove.com.

Table of Contents

Preface xv

Acknowledgments xix

About the Author xxi

Chapter 1: Hardware, Processes, and Threads 1

Examining the Insides of a Computer 1

The Motivation for Multicore Processors 3

The Characteristics of Multiprocessor Systems 18

The Translation of Source Code to Assembly Language 21

Summary 29

Chapter 2: Coding for Performance 31

Defining Performance 31

Understanding Algorithmic Complexity 33

How Structure Impacts Performance 39

The Role of the Compiler 60

Identifying Where Time Is Spent Using Profiling 74

How Not to Optimize 80

Performance by Design 82

Summary 83

Chapter 3: Identifying Opportunities for Parallelism 85

Using Multiple Processes to Improve System Productivity 85

Multiple Users Utilizing a Single System 87

Improving Machine Efficiency Through Consolidation 88

Using Parallelism to Improve the Performance of a Single Task 92

Parallelization Patterns 100

How Dependencies Influence the Ability Run Code in Parallel 110

Identifying Parallelization Opportunities 118

Summary 119

Chapter 4: Synchronization and Data Sharing 121

Data Races 121

Synchronization Primitives 126

Deadlocks and Livelocks 132

Communication Between Threads and Processes 133

Storing Thread-Private Data 141

Summary 142

Chapter 5: Using POSIX Threads 143

Creating Threads 143

Compiling Multithreaded Code 151

Process Termination 153

Sharing Data Between Threads 154

Variables and Memory 175

Multiprocess Programming 179

Sockets 193

Reentrant Code and Compiler Flags 197

Summary 198

Chapter 6: Windows Threading 199

Creating Native Windows Threads 199

Methods of Synchronization and Resource Sharing 208

Wide String Handling in Windows 221

Creating Processes 222

Atomic Updates of Variables 238

Allocating Thread-Local Storage 240

Setting Thread Priority 242

Summary 244

Chapter 7: Using Automatic Parallelization and OpenMP 245

Using Automatic Parallelization to Produce a Parallel Application 245

Using OpenMP to Produce a Parallel Application 256

Ensuring That Code in a Parallel Region Is Executed in Order 285

Collapsing Loops to Improve Workload Balance 286

Enforcing Memory Consistency 287

An Example of Parallelization 288

Summary 293

Chapter 8: Hand-Coded Synchronization and Sharing 295

Atomic Operations 295

Operating System–Provided Atomics 309

Lockless Algorithms 312

Summary 332

Chapter 9: Scaling with Multicore Processors 333

Constraints to Application Scaling 333

Hardware Constraints to Scaling 352

Operating System Constraints to Scaling 369

Multicore Processors and Scaling 380

Summary 381

Chapter 10: Other Parallelization Technologies 383

GPU-Based Computing 383

Language Extensions 386

Alternative Languages 399

Clustering Technologies 402

Transactional Memory 407

Vectorization 408

Summary 409

Chapter 11: Concluding Remarks 411

Writing Parallel Applications 411

Parallel Code on Multicore Processors 414

The Future 416

Bibliography 417

Index 419