Effective Concurrency

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Effective Concurrency

upcoming public offerings
10/18/2010 - 10/21/2010 Herb Sutter ($2,495)	register now
Register by September 18th and pay $2,195 (save $300)

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course overview

This course covers the fundamental tools that software developers need to write effective concurrent software for both single-core and multi-core/many-core machines. To use concurrency effectively, we must identify and solve four key challenges:

Leverage the ability to perform and manage work asynchronously
Build applications that naturally run faster on new hardware having more and more cores
Manage shared objects in memory effectively
Engineer specifically for high performance

This seminar will equip attendees to reason correctly about concurrency requirements and tradeoffs, to migrate existing code bases to be concurrency-enabled, and to achieve key success factors for a concurrent programming project. Most code examples in the course can be directly translated to popular platforms and concurrency libraries, including Linux, Windows, Java, .NET, pthreads, and the forthcoming ISO C++0x standard.

the seminar includes the following topics

Fundamentals

Define basic concurrency goals and requirements
Understand applications' scalability needs
Key concurrency patterns

Isolation: Keep Work Separate

Running tasks in isolation and communicate via async messages
Integrating multiple messaging systems, including GUIs and sockets
Building responsive applications using background workers
Threads vs. thread pools

Scalability: Re-enable the Free Lunch

When and how to use more cores
Exploiting parallelism in algorithms
Exploiting parallelism in data structures
Breaking the scalability barrier

Consistency: Don’t Corrupt Shared State

The many pitfalls of locks--deadlock, convoys, etc.
Locking best practices
Reducing the need for locking shared data
Safe lock-free coding patterns
Avoiding the pitfalls of general lock-free coding
Races and race-related effects

Migrating Existing Code Bases to Use Concurrency

Near-Future Tools and Features

High Performance Concurrency

Machine architecture and concurrency
Costs of fundamental operations, including locks, context switches, and system calls
Memory and cache effects
Data structures that support and undermine concurrency
Enabling linear and superlinear scaling

available instructors

Herb Sutter

questions?