Parallel Computing

It is not unusual for workstations and PCs to operate on multiple threads at the same time through the use of either two or four CPUs (also known as cores). Experts anticipate seeing many more cores in the near future. By writing parallel code, developers can make the most of existing hardware, distributing workloads over more than one processor. This time of parallelization used to mean manipulating multiple locks and threads, but that is no longer always the case. Parallel programming is now facilitated by the .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010, which provide new diagnostic tools, class library types, and runtime. These features make the process of parallel development much simpler, because developers can work in a natural language, avoiding direct creation and manipulation of the thread pool and individual threads. The result is scalable, fine-grained, and efficient code, as illustrated below.