Books about Multiprocessing from Amazon.com

Multi-core chips from Intel and AMD offer a dramatic boost in speed and responsiveness, and plenty of opportunities for multiprocessing on ordinary desktop computers But they also present a challenge: More than ever, multithreading is a requirement for good performance. This guide explains how to maximize the benefits of these processors through a portable C++ library that works on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Unix systems. With it, you'll learn how to use Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB) effectively for parallel programming -- without having to be a threading expert. Written by James Reinders, Chief Evangelist of Intel Software Products, and based on the experience of Intel's developers and customers, this book explains the key tasks in multithreading and how to accomplish them with TBB in a portable and robust manner. With plenty of examples and full reference material, the book lays out common patterns of uses, reveals the gotchas in TBB, and gives important guidelines for choosing among alternatives in order to get the best performance. You'll learn how Intel Threading Building Blocks: Enables you to specify tasks instead of threads for better portability, easier programming, more understandable source code, and better performance and scalability in general Focuses on the goal of parallelizing computationally intensive work to deliver high-level solutions Is compatible with other threading packages, and doesn't force you to pick one package for your entire program Emphasizes scalable, data-parallel programming, which allows program performance to increase as you add processors Relies on generic programming, which enables you to write the best possible algorithms with thefewest constraints Any C++ programmer who wants to write an application to run on a multi-core system will benefit from this book. TBB is also very approachable for a C programmer or a C++ programmer without much experience with templates. Best of all, you don't need experience with parallel programming or multi-core processors to use this book..
Price: $25.44 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Computers are just as busy as the rest of us nowadays They have lots of tasks to do at once, and need some cleverness to get them all done at the same time. That's why threads are seen more and more often as a new model for programming Threads have been available for some time. The Mach operating system, the Distributed Computer Environment (DCE), and Windows NT all feature threads. One advantage of most UNIX implementations, as well as DCE, is that they conform to a recently ratified POSIX standard (originally 1003.4a, now 1003.1c), which allows your programs to be portable between them. POSIX threads are commonly known as pthreads, after the word that starts all the names of the function calls. The standard is supported by Solaris, OSF/1, AIX, and several other UNIX-based operating systems. The idea behind threads programming is to have multiple tasks running concurrently within the same program. They can share a single CPU as processes do, or take advantage of multiple CPUs when available. In either case, they provide a clean way to divide the tasks of a program while sharing data. A window interface can read input on dozens of different buttons, each responsible for a separate task. A network server has to accept simultaneous calls from many clients, providing each with reasonable response time. A multiprocessor runs a number-crunching program on several CPUs at once, combining the results when all are done. All these kinds of applications can benefit from threads. In this book you will learn not only what the pthread calls are, but when it is a good idea to use threads and how to make them efficient (which is the whole reason for using threads in the first place). The authors delves into performance issues, comparing threads to processes, contrasting kernel threads to user threads, and showing how to measure speed. He also describes in a simple, clear manner what all the advanced features are for, and how threads interact with the rest of the UNIX system. Topics include:

• Basic design techniques
• Mutexes, conditions, and specialized synchronization techniques
• Scheduling, priorities, and other real-time issues
• Cancellation
• UNIX libraries and re-entrant routines
• Signals
• Debugging tips
• Measuring performance
• Special considerations for the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE)

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Price: $86.14 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Any UNIX programmer using the latest workstations or super minicomputers from vendors such as Sun, Silicon Graphics (SGI), AT&T, Amdahl, IBM, Apple, Compaq, Mentor Graphics, and Thinking Machines needs this book to optimize his/her job performance. This book teaches how these architectures operate using clear, comprehensible examples to explain the concepts, and provides a good reference for people already familiar with the basic concepts..
Price: $49.97 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Shared memory multiprocessors are becoming the dominant architecture for small-scale parallel computation This book is the first to provide a coherent review of current research in shared memory multiprocessing in the United States and Japan. It focuses particularly on scalable architectures that will be able to support hundreds of microprocessors as well as on efficient and economical ways of connecting these fast microprocessors. The twenty contributions are divided into sections covering the experience to date with multiprocessors, cache coherency, software systems, and examples of scalable shared memory multiprocessors..
Price: $69.86 [Notify me when price goes down.]