A Guide to Parallel Programming – Drafts of Chapters 3 & 4

Monday, May 31, 2010 – 12:23 PM

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We’ve just dropped another two chapters and sample code to the Parallel Programming Guide to CodePlex site.

These next two draft chapters are:

Chapter 3 Parallel Tasks

Chapter 2 shows how you can use a parallel loop to apply a single operation to many data elements. This is data parallelism. This chapter explains what happens when there are distinct asynchronous operations that can run simultaneously. In this situation, you can temporarily fork a program’s flow of control with tasks that can potentially execute in parallel. This is task parallelism.

Chapter 4 Parallel Aggregation

Chapter 2 shows how to use parallel techniques that apply the same independent operation to many input values. However, not all parallel loops have loop bodies that execute independently. For example, a loop that calculates a sum does not have independent steps. All of the steps accumulate their results in a single variable that represents the sum calculated up to that point. This accumulated value is an aggregation.

This means that the Preface and Chapters 1-5 are now available online, including these new chapters in draft form. As always if you have feedback then you can put comments here or discuss it on the CodePlex site.