.NET 4.5 Parallel Extensions Cookbook

.NET 4.5 Parallel Extensions Cookbook

By : Bryan Freeman

Buy this Book

.NET 4.5 Parallel Extensions Cookbook

By: Bryan Freeman

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

.NET parallel extensions brings the power of parallel and asynchronous programming to a much wider developer audience than ever before. This book will give a developer with no multithreaded development experience the ability to write highly scalable parallel applications that take advantage of modern multicore processors.If you are an experienced .NET developer who wants to put parallel extensions to work in your applications, this book is for you. ".NET 4.5 Parallel Extensions Cookbook" is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a number of clear step-by-step recipes that will introduce parallelism into your applications and take advantage of modern multicore processors. This book is a crash course in using the extensions, with theory and concepts kept to a minimum. ".NET 4.5 Parallel Extensions Cookbook" offers a wide-ranging presentation of parallel development concepts, and provides a working knowledge of key technologies that are important to developers who want to take advantage of multi-core architectures. You will learn how to compose a series of producer/consumer tasks into a pipeline that can process data elements received from a real-time event stream. You will also learn how to connect the stages of pipelines together using the concurrent collections. You will learn everything you need to know to transform the multicore power found in modern processors into application performance and scalability.

.NET 4.5 Parallel Extensions Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Getting Started with Task Parallel Library

Introduction

Creating a task

Waiting for tasks to finish

Returning results from a task

Passing data to a task

Creating a child task

Lazy task execution

Handling task exceptions using try/catch block

Handling task exceptions with AggregateException.Handle

Cancelling a task

Cancelling one of many tasks

Implementing Continuations

Introduction

Continuing a task

Passing task results to a continuation

Continue "WhenAny" and "WhenAll"

Specifying when a continuation will run

Using a continuation for exception handling

Cancelling a continuation

Using a continuation to chain multiple tasks

Using a continuation to update a UI

Learning Concurrency with Parallel Loops

Introduction

Creating a basic parallel for loop

Creating a basic parallel foreach loop

Breaking a parallel loop

Stopping a parallel loop

Cancelling a parallel loop

Handling exceptions in a parallel loop

Controlling the degree of parallelism in a loop

Partitioning data in a parallel loop

Using Thread Local Storage

Parallel LINQ

Introduction

Creating a basic parallel query

Preserving order in parallel LINQ

Forcing parallel execution

Limiting parallelism in a query

Processing query results

Specifying merge options

Range projection with parallel LINQ

Handling exceptions in parallel LINQ

Cancelling a parallel LINQ query

Performing reduction operations

Creating a custom partitioner

Concurrent Collections

Introduction

Adding and removing items to BlockingCollection

Iterating a BlockingCollection with GetConsumingEnumerable

Performing LIFO operations with ConcurrentStack

Thread safe data lookups with ConcurrentDictionary

Cancelling an operation in a concurrent collection

Working with multiple producers and consumers

Creating object pool with ConcurrentStack

Adding blocking and bounding with IProducerConsumerCollection

Using multiple concurrent collections to create a pipeline

Synchronization Primitives

Introduction

Using monitor

Using a mutual exclusion lock

Using SpinLock for synchronization

Interlocked operations

Synchronizing multiple tasks with a Barrier

Using ReaderWriterLockSlim

Using WaitHandles with Mutex

Waiting for multiple threads with CountdownEvent

Using ManualResetEventSlim to spin and wait

Using SemaphoreSlim to limit access

Profiling and Debugging

Introduction

Using the Threads and Call Stack windows

Using the Parallel Stacks window

Watching values in a thread with Parallel Watch window

Detecting deadlocks with the Parallel Tasks window

Measure CPU utilization with Concurrency Visualizer

Using Concurrency Visualizer Threads view

Using Concurrency Visualizer Cores view

Async

Introduction

Creating an async method

Handling Exceptions in asynchronous code

Cancelling an asynchronous operation

Cancelling async operation after timeout period

Processing multiple async tasks as they complete

Improving performance of async solution with Task.WhenAll

Using async for file access

Checking the progress of an asynchronous task

Dataflow Library

Introduction

Reading from and writing to a dataflow block synchronously

Reading from and writing to a dataflow block asynchronously

Implementing a producer-consumer dataflow pattern

Creating a dataflow pipeline

Cancelling a dataflow block

Specifying the degree of parallelism

Unlink dataflow blocks

Using JoinBlock to read from multiple data sources

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Forcing parallel execution

Parallel LINQ looks for opportunities to parallelize a query, but not all queries run faster in parallel. For example, a query that contains a single delegate that does only a little bit of work will usually run faster sequentially, because the overhead of parallelizing outweighs the benefits gained from parallelizing it.

For the most part, parallel LINQ does a really good job of determining what should be parallelized and what should run sequentially, based on its examination of the shape of the query. However, the algorithm it uses is not perfect, and you might need to instruct PLINQ to run your query in parallel.

In this recipe, we will build a Console application that creates a query which PLINQ will determine whether it needs to be executed sequentially. We will then force the query to run in parallel using the WithExecutionMode method. Finally, we will capture the time it takes for both queries to run and compare the results.

How to do it…

Now, let's see how...

.NET 4.5 Parallel Extensions Cookbook

By : Bryan Freeman

.NET 4.5 Parallel Extensions Cookbook

By: Bryan Freeman

Overview of this book

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.NET 4.5 Parallel Extensions Cookbook

Forcing parallel execution

How to do it…