multi-core software

[Piet van Oostrum]

By the way, there is a series of articles about concurrency on ACM Queue
which may be interesting for those participating in or just following
this discussion:

http://queue.acm.org/listing.cfm?item_topic=Concurrency&qc_type=theme_list&filter=Concurrency&page_title=Concurrency

Here is one introductory paragraph from one of the articles:

    Parallel programming poses many new challenges to the developer, one of
    which is synchronizing concurrent access to shared memory by multiple
    threads. Programmers have traditionally used locks for synchronization,
    but lock-based synchronization has well-known pitfalls. Simplistic
    coarse-grained locking does not scale well, while more sophisticated
    fine-grained locking risks introducing deadlocks and data races.
    Furthermore, scalable libraries written using fine-grained locks cannot
    be easily composed in a way that retains scalability and avoids deadlock
    and data races. 
-- 
Piet van Oostrum <piet at cs.uu.nl>
URL: http://pietvanoostrum.com [PGP 8DAE142BE17999C4]
Private email: piet at vanoostrum.org