Intel Threading Building Blocks

Correctness

The biggest challenge of learning to Think Parallel is understanding correctness as it relates to concurrency. Concurrency means you have multiple threads of control that are active at one time. The operating system is going to schedule those threads in a number of ways. Each time the program runs, the precise order of operations will potentially be different. Your challenge as a programmer is to make sure that every legitimate way the operations in your concurrent program can be ordered will still lead to the correct result. A high-level abstraction such as Threading Building Blocks helps a great deal, but there are a few issues you have to grapple with on your own: potential variations in results when programs compute results in parallel, and new types of programming bugs when locks are used incorrectly.

Computations done in parallel often get different results than the original sequential program. Round-off errors are the most common surprise for many programmers when a program is modified to run in parallel. You should expect numeric results to vary slightly when computations are changed to run in parallel. For example, computing (A+B+C+D)as ((A+B)+(C+D))enables A+B and C+D to be computed in parallel, but the final sum may be slightly different from other evaluations such as (((A+B)+C)+D). Even the parallel results can differ from run to run, depending on the order of the operations.

A few types of program failures can happen only in a parallel program because they ...