In a previous post Should I expose asynchronous wrappers for synchronous methods?, I discussed “async over sync,” the notion of using synchronous functionality asynchronously and the benefits that doing so may or may not yield. The other direction of “sync over async” is also interesting to explore. Avoid Exposing Synchro...
Every now and then, I get this question: “is it ok to use nested Parallel.For loops?” The short answer is “yes.” As is often the case, the longer answer is, well, longer. Typically when folks ask this question, they’re concerned about one of two things. First, they’re concerned that each nested loop will assume it “owns the machine” and will t...
We've spent a lot of time touting improvements to the .NET Framework in .NET 4 around threading, including core enhancements to the performance of the runtime itself. Sometimes data is more powerful than words, however, and it's useful to be able to see exactly what kind of difference such improvements can make. To assist with that, her...
(The full set of ParallelExtensionsExtras Tour posts is available here.)In our last two ParallelExtensionsExtras blog tour posts, we’ve discussed two TaskScheduler implementations in ParallelExtensionsExtras: StaTaskScheduler and ConcurrentExclusiveInterleave. These are just 2 of more than 10 schedulers in ParallelExtensionsExtras, and ...
Attendees at PDC09 this past week were privy to quite a few sessions on parallel computing. Now that the videos of these sessions are online, you can view them as well from the comfort of your own home. Here are some of the key parallelism-related sessions from this past week:Overview Managed code in Visual Studio 2010 ...
Last week, I had the privilege of touring around Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Michigan, speaking about the new parallel computing support in Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4. Many folks I spoke with were interested in getting a copy of the slide deck I used, so I’ve attached it to this blog post. Enjoy! Toub_ParallelismTour...
“What does Task.Wait do?” Simple question, right? At a high-level, yes, the method achieves what its name implies, preventing the current thread from making forward progress past the call to Wait until the target Task has completed, one way or another. If the Task ran to completion, Wait will return successfully. If th...
The Task abstractions in .NET 4 run on instances of the TaskScheduler class. Two implementations of TaskScheduler ship as part of the .NET Framework 4. The first is the default scheduler, which is integrated with the .NET 4 ThreadPool and takes advantage of its work-stealing queues. The second is the type of TaskScheduler returned...
One of the ways in which the Task Parallel Library achieves good performance is through “work-stealing”. Work-stealing is supported in the .NET 4 ThreadPool for access through the Task Parallel Library and its default scheduler. This manifests as every thread in the ThreadPool having its own queue for work; when that thread ...
Prior to the .NET Framework 2.0, unhandled exceptions were largely ignored by the runtime. For example, if a work item queued to the ThreadPool threw an exception that went unhandled by that work item, the ThreadPool would eat that exception and continue on its merry way. Similarly, if a finalizer running on the finalizer thread threw a...
