Ivor Horton's Beginning Visual C++® 2010

Chapter 13. Programming for Multiple Cores

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• The principle features of the Parallel Patterns Library

• How to execute loop iterations in parallel

• How to execute two or more tasks concurrently

• How to manage shared resources in parallel operations

• How to indicate and manage sections in your parallel code that must not be executed by multiple processors

If your PC or laptop is relatively new, in all probability it has a processor chip with two or more cores. If it doesn't, you can skip this chapter and move on to the next chapter. Each core in a multi-core processor chip is an independent processing unit, so your computer can be executing code from more than one application at any given time. However, it is not limited to that. Having multiple cores or multiple processors provides you with the possibility of overlapping computations within a single application by having each processor handling a separate piece of the calculations required in parallel. Because at least some of the calculations in your application are overlapped, your application should execute faster.

This chapter will show you how you can use multiple cores within a single application. You will also get to use what you learned about the Windows API in the previous chapter in a significant parallel computation.

PARALLEL PROCESSING BASICS

Programming an application to use multiple cores or processors requires that you organize the computation differently from what you have been used to with serial ...