Parallelism shift and threading

I've written a master's thesis that tries to summarize the shift to parallelism in its current state. It analyzes why threading is not a suitable programming model for extracting parallel performance and how we still can "thread for performance" (which we must because threading is well understood and widely available).


I'd love to have a discussion on what I've written. If you have some spare time, you can find the thesis at www.johantorp.com



Best Regards, Johan Torp


======= ABSTRACT =========

Part 1 - A bird's eye view of desktop parallelism,
Part 2 - Zooming in on C++0x's memory model

The first part of the thesis is an overview of the paradigmatic shift to parallelism that is currently taking place. It explains why processors need to become parallel, how they might function and which types of parallelism there are. Given that information, it explains why threads and locks is not a suitable programming model and how threading is being improved and used to extract parallel performance. It also covers the problems that await new parallel programming models and how they might work. The final chapter surveys the landscape of existing parallel software and hardware projects and relates them to the overview. The overview is intended for programmers and architects of desktop and embedded systems.

The second part explains how to use C++'s upcoming memory model and atomic API. It also relates the memory model to classical definitions of distributed computing in an attempt to bridge the gap in terminology between the research literature and C++. An implementation of hazard pointers and a lock-free stack and queue are given as example C++0x code. This part is aimed at expert C++ developers and the research community.