Book Image

Mastering C++ Multithreading

By : Maya Posch
Book Image

Mastering C++ Multithreading

By: Maya Posch

Overview of this book

Multithreaded applications execute multiple threads in a single processor environment, allowing developers achieve concurrency. This book will teach you the finer points of multithreading and concurrency concepts and how to apply them efficiently in C++. Divided into three modules, we start with a brief introduction to the fundamentals of multithreading and concurrency concepts. We then take an in-depth look at how these concepts work at the hardware-level as well as how both operating systems and frameworks use these low-level functions. In the next module, you will learn about the native multithreading and concurrency support available in C++ since the 2011 revision, synchronization and communication between threads, debugging concurrent C++ applications, and the best programming practices in C++. In the final module, you will learn about atomic operations before moving on to apply concurrency to distributed and GPGPU-based processing. The comprehensive coverage of essential multithreading concepts means you will be able to efficiently apply multithreading concepts while coding in C++.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
8
Atomic Operations - Working with the Hardware

Potential issues


A common mistake with GPGPU applications is reading the result buffer before the processing has finished. After transferring the buffer to the device and executing the kernel, one has to insert synchronization points to signal the host that it has finished processing. These generally should be implemented using asynchronous methods.

As we just covered in the section on latency, it's important to keep in mind the potentially very large delays between a request and response, depending on the memory sub-system or bus. Failure to do so may cause weird glitches, freezes and crashes, as well as data corruption and an application which will seemingly wait forever.

It is crucial to profile a GPGPU application to get a good idea of what the GPU utilization is, and whether the process flow is anywhere near being optimal.