Web Directory

» A Thread Performance Comparison
   Compares Windows NT and Solaris on a symmetric multiprocessor machine.
   http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/usenix-nt98/full_papers/zabatta/zabatta_html/zabatta.html

» Application-Level Abstractions for Lock-Free Data Sharing
   Describes lock-free data sharing, otherwise known as "wait-free data sharing" as an alternative to the use of locks.
   http://www.ddj.com/cpp/205200452

» Apply Critical Sections Consistently
   Critical sections are the One True Tool for guaranteeing mutual exclusion on shared variables. Like most tools, these must be applied consistently, and with the intended meanings.
   http://www.ddj.com/cpp/202401098

» Avoid Exposing Concurrency: Hide It Inside Synchronous Methods
   Explains where to start when trying to add concurrency to a mass of existing code.
   http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220600388

» Avoiding the Perils of C++0x Data Races
   Find out what dangers race conditions in general and C++0x data races in particular pose to concurrent code, as well as the strategies for avoiding them.
   http://www.devx.com/cplus/Article/42725

» Bibliography on Threads and Multithreading
   Part of the Computer Science Bibliography Collection.
   http://liinwww.ira.uka.de/bibliography/Os/threads.html

» Break Up and Interleave Work to Keep Threads Responsive
   Breaking up is hard to do, but interleaving can be even subtler.
   http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217801299

» Concurrency in the D Programming Language
   Andrei Alexandrescu explains recent hardware changes allowing concurrency and how the D programming languages addresses these possibilities.
   http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1609144

» Concurrent Programming: Principles and Practice
   This book provides an in-depth overview of underlying principles as well as practical techniques that can be used to design concurrent programs. (Greg Andrews)
   http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/academic/product/0,,0805300864,00%2ben-USS_01DBC.html

» Deadlock: The Problem and a Solution
   This article explains what deadlocks are and describes ways of circumventing deadlocks.
   http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/misc/misc/threadsprocesses/article.php/c15545/

» Design for Manycore Systems
   This column is about why it's time right now to think about systems with lots of cores. In short: Software is the (only) gating factor; as that gate falls, hardware parallelism is coming more and sooner than many people yet believe.
   http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=219200099

» Foundations of Multithreaded, Parallel, and Distributed Programming
   This book teaches the fundamental concepts of multithreaded, parallel and distributed computing. Emphasizes how to solve problems, with correctness the primary concern and performance an important, but secondary, concern. (Gregory R. Andrews)
   http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/academic/product/0,,0201357526,00%2ben-USS_01DBC.html

» Fundamental Concepts of Parallel Programming
   Explains fundamental concepts for moving from a linear to a parallel programming model
   http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/212002418

» Fundamentals of Multithreading
   Technical article, covering Amdahl's Law, latencies and bandwidth, on-chip multiprocessing, Jackson technology, and simultaneous multithreading. (SystemLogic.net)
   http://www.slcentral.com/articles/01/6/multithreading/

» Generic Synchronization Policies in C++
   Most uses of synchronization code in multi-threaded applications fall into a small number of high-level “usage patterns”, or what can be called generic synchronization policies (GSPs). This paper illustrates how the use of such GSPs simplify the writi
   http://www.ciaranmchale.com/gsp/

» It's (Not) All Been Done
   Every decade or so there is a major revolution in the way software is developed. But, unlike the object and web revolutions, the concurrency revolution can be seen coming.
   http://www.gotw.ca/publications/guest-ed-200609.htm

» It's Not Always Nice To Share
   It isn't just languages that have poor support for thread local storage, but operating systems too
   http://www.ddj.com/cpp/217600495

» Lock Options
   Presents a solution to races and deadlocks based on a well-known deadlock-avoidance protocol and shows how it can be enforced by the compiler. It can be applied to programs in which the number of locks is fixed and known up front.
   http://www.ddj.com/cpp/212201754

» Lock-Free Code: A False Sense of Security
   Writing lock-free code can confound anyone-even expert programmers, as Herb shows in this article.
   http://www.ddj.com/cpp/210600279

» Lock-free Interprocess Communication
   Interprocess communication is an essential component of modern software engineering. Often, lock-free IPC is accomplished via special processor commands. This article propose a communication type that requires only atomic writing of processor word from pr
   http://www.ddj.com/cpp/189401457

» Maximize Locality, Minimize Contention
   Explains why in the concurrent world, locality is a first-order issue that trumps most other performance considerations. Now locality is no longer just about fitting well into cache and RAM, but to avoid scalability busters by keeping tightly coupled data
   http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/208200273

» Measuring Parallel Performance: Optimizing a Concurrent Queue
   Shows different ways of how to write a fast, internally synchronized queue, one that callers can use without any explicit external locking or other synchronization, and compares the performance.
   http://www.ddj.com/cpp/212201163

» Multi-threaded Algorithm Implementations
   Explores effective uses of threads by looking at a multi-threaded implementation of the QuickSort algorithm and reports on situations where using threads will not help.
   http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/06/may-column-multithreaded-algor.html

» Multi-threaded Debugging Techniques
   Describes a number of general purpose debugging techniques for multi-threaded applications.
   http://www.ddj.com/cpp/199200938

» Multithreaded File I/O
   So far multithreaded file I/O is a under-researched field. Although its simple to measure, there is not much common knowledge about it. The measurements presented here show that multithreading can improve performance of file access directly, as well as in
   http://www.ddj.com/cpp/220300055

» Practical Lock-Free Buffers
   Looks at how lock-free programming avoids system failure by tolerating individual process failures.
   http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=219500200

» Prefer Futures to Baked-In "Async APIs"
   Explains that it's important to separate "what" from "how" when designing concurrent APIs.
   http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222301165

» Prefer Structured Lifetimes: Local, Nested, Bounded, Deterministic
   What's good for the function and the object is also good for the thread, the task, and the lock.
   http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221601309

» Protothreads
   Very lightweight stackless threads; give linear code execution for event-driven systems, designed to use little memory; library is pure C, no platform-specific Assembly; usable with or without OS. Open source, BSD-type license.
   http://www.sics.se/~adam/pt/

» RT++
   Higher order threads for C++; tutorial and reference manual.
   http://www.risc.uni-linz.ac.at/software/rt++/

» Real-world Concurrency
   Describes some key principles that will help mastering the "black art" of writing multithreaded code.
   http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=554

» Sharing Is the Root of All Contention
   Sharing requires waiting and overhead, and is a natural enemy of scalability. This article focuses on one important case, namely mutable (writable) shared objects in memory, which are an inherent bottleneck to scalability on multicore systems.
   http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/214100002

» Software and the Concurrency Revolution
   Focuses on the implications of concurrency for software and its consequences for both programming languages and programmers. (Herb Sutter and James Larus)
   http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=332

» State Threads Library
   Small application library for writing fast, highly scalable Internet programs on Unix-like platforms. Open source, MPL or GPL.
   http://state-threads.sourceforge.net/

» Survey of Threads
   Comparing Solaris, Linux, and Windows NT threads.
   http://www.northco.net/chenke/project/project2.html

» Sutter Speaks: A Conversation with the Concurrency Whisperer
   Multi- and many-core chips are entering the mainstream — and one of the first software development authorities to take note was C++ expert Herb Sutter. Thanks to his practical insights, a new generation may grok concurrency sooner than previously though
   http://www.devx.com/go-parallel/Article/37573

» Sutter Speaks: The Future of Concurrency
   What does the future hold for concurrency? What will happen to the tools and techniques around concurrent programming? In part two of our series, concurrency guru Herb Sutter talks about these issues and what developers need to be reading to understand co
   http://www.devx.com/go-parallel/Article/37839

» The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software
   The biggest sea change in software development since the OO revolution is knocking at the door, and its name is Concurrency.
   http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm

» The Many Faces of Deadlock
   Explains that deadlock can happen whenever there is a blocking (or waiting) cycle among concurrent tasks.
   http://www.ddj.com/cpp/209900973

» The Pillars of Concurrency
   This article makes the case that a consistent mental model is needed to talk about concurrency.
   http://www.ddj.com/cpp/200001985

» The Problem with Threads
   Argues that for concurrent programming to become mainstream, threads must be discarded as a programming model. Nondeterminism should be judiciously and carefully introduced where needed, and it should be explicit in programs.
   http://www.computer.org/portal/site/computer/menuitem.5d61c1d591162e4b0ef1bd108bcd45f3/index.jsp?&pName=computer_level1_article&TheCat=1005&path=computer/homepage/0506&file=cover.xml&xsl=article.xsl&

» Understanding Parallel Performance
   Explains how to accurately analyze the real performance of parallel code and lists some basic considerations and common costs.
   http://www.ddj.com/cpp/211800538

» Use Lock Hierarchies to Avoid Deadlock
   Explains how to use lock hierarchies to avoid deadlock by assigning each shared resource a level that corresponds to its architectural layer.
   http://www.ddj.com/cpp/204801163

» Use Thread Pools Correctly: Keep Tasks Short and Nonblocking
   A thread pool hides a lot of details, but to use it effectively some awareness of some things a pool does under the covers is needed to avoid inadvertently hitting performance and correctness pitfalls.
   http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=216500409

» Use Threads Correctly = Isolation + Asynchronous Messages
   Motivates and illustrate best practices for using threads - techniques that will make concurrent code easier to write correctly and to reason about with confidence.
   http://www.ddj.com/go-parallel/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=215900465

» What's New in Boost Threads?
   The Boost.Thread library, which enables the use of multiple threads of execution with shared data in portable C++ code, has undergone some major changes.
   http://www.ddj.com/cpp/211600441

» Writing Lock-Free Code: A Corrected Queue
   Explores lock-free code by focusing on creating a lock-free queue.
   http://www.ddj.com/cpp/210604448

» comp.programming.threads FAQ
   Frequently asked questions (by Bryan O'Sullivan).
   http://www.serpentine.com/blog/threads-faq/

» volatile - Multithreaded Programmer's Best Friend
   Discusses the usage of the volatile keyword in multithreaded C++ programs.
   http://www.ddj.com/cpp/184403766