Monday, October 9, 2017

Is Parallel Programming still hard?

CppCon 2017 is over and some of the talks are starting to trickle in.
One that is definitely worth watching is the one by Michael Wong, Paul McKenney and Maged Michael. If you don't know who these guys are then go and read this post.

Here are the two videos:


My favorite quote from the talk:
"It is possible to split atoms, but doing that spoils them for electronics use".

Nice intro to false sharing, store buffers and caches. All of those are hardware details that (unfortunately) are important in multi-threaded programming, and are rarely talked about.
 
About the Reader-Writer Lock slides (a subject I've dug deep into with Andreia), there is a much simpler way than using a TLS RW-Lock, namely the scalable reader-writer locks. More info can be seen on this post:
http://concurrencyfreaks.blogspot.nl/2015/01/scalable-reader-writer-lock-in-c1x.html

Let's see what the next talks will be about...