February 2009 Entries
Well, I said I was going to be moving on to CountdownEvent, but I was wrong. there is one more aspect of using Barrier that I just had to share (thanks go to Stephen Toub on the Parallel Computing Platform team for bringing this up). In my first Barrier post, I had mentioned: Barrier is a great new synchronization primitive to use when there is a known amount of work to do that is being done by different workers that all have common synchronization points. To make a long story short, this isn’t strictly...
Over the coming months, I would like to take you on a whirlwind tour of a bunch of the new data structures and APIs being added to the Base Class Libraries (BCL) for .NET Framework 4.0. This will take us everywhere from new multithreading-oriented data structures like Barrier and CountdownEvent, to more basic structures like Tuple. I’ll update this post with correct links as new posts are created… An Intro to Barrier An Intro to Barrier, Continued An Intro to CountdownEvent An Intro to LazyInit An...
In this first stage of our Tour de BCL, we will be passing through the new Barrier class. So what is a Barrier? Let’s take a look at the boring technical description for a Barrier: A Barrier is a synchronization primitive that enforces the stopping of execution between a number of threads or processes at a given point and prevents further execution until all threads or processors have reached the given point. I don’t know about you, but sometimes technical descriptions like the above just sound like...