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Threads

The basic entity for programming multi-processor machines are threads. They represent parts of the program which are executed in parallel. Threads can be considered as separate programs that work on the same main memory. On single-processor machines, they are simulated by letting each thread run for some time (usually a few milliseconds) before switching to the next thread. On multi-processor machines, threads can truly be executed in parallel. In order to let programs use more than one thread (which would be the regular sequential program), several aspects need to be covered:

As mentioned, only the second aspect can be canonicalized, so we will treat it first. Some examples of actual parallelized applications are discussed in Section 4.


next up previous
Next: Creating and managing threads Up: No Title Previous: Background
Wolfgang Bangerth
2000-04-20