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Showing posts from December, 2013

Concurrency Behaviors

Concurrency Behaviors General concurrency behaviors Prior to the general availability of multiple core hardware architectures there was very little to be gained by the use of concurrent or parallel program design. The overhead of thread switching on a single processor almost always resulted in slower performance than could be achieved with traditional serial programming design. Now that a majority of our computing systems, whether personal computers, laptops, tablets, mainframes, super computers, or cell phones operate on hardware with multiple processor cores, there is a real need to build an understanding of concurrent or parallel processing design. Concurrent program design promises high efficiency, if we can only master the complexity of sharing and combining data from concurrent, and therefore largely asynchronous execution paths in our programs. While one can assign work to separate cores, if that work is performed in a synchronous manner, such as is done with t...