Multicore Application Programming: for Windows, Linux, and Oracle Solaris (Developer's Library) [Paperback]

Darryl Gove (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 19, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0321711378 | ISBN-13: 978-0321711373 | Edition: 1

Write High-Performance, Highly Scalable Multicore Applications for Leading Platforms

Multicore Application Programming is a comprehensive, practical guide to high-performance multicore programming that any experienced developer can use.

 

Author Darryl Gove covers the leading approaches to parallelization on Windows, Linux, and Oracle Solaris. Through practical examples, he illuminates the challenges involved in writing applications that fully utilize multicore processors, helping you produce applications that are functionally correct, offer superior performance, and scale well to eight cores, sixteen cores, and beyond.

 

The book reveals how specific hardware implementations impact application performance and shows how to avoid common pitfalls. Step by step, you’ll write applications that can handle large numbers of parallel threads, and you’ll master advanced parallelization techniques. You’ll learn how to

 

• Identify your best opportunities to use parallelism
• Share data safely between multiple threads
• Write applications using POSIX or Windows threads
• Hand-code synchronization and sharing
• Take advantage of automatic parallelization and OpenMP
• Overcome common obstacles to scaling
• Apply new approaches to writing correct, fast, scalable parallel code

 

Multicore Application Programming isn’t wedded to a single approach or platform: It is for every experienced C programmer working with any contemporary multicore processor in any leading operating system environment.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Darryl Gove is a senior principal software engineer in the Oracle Solaris Studio compiler team. He works on the analysis, parallelization, and optimization of both applications and benchmarks. Darryl has a master’s degree and a doctorate in operational research from the University of Southampton, UK. He is the author of the books Solaris Application Programming (Prentice Hall, 2008) and The Developer’s Edge (Sun Microsystems, 2009). He writes regularly about optimization and coding and maintains a blog at www.darrylgove.com.

Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (November 19, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321711378
• ISBN-13: 978-0321711373
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 0.9 x 8.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #400,715 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #8 in Books > Computers & Technology > Operating Systems > Linux > Applications
  • #23 in Books > Computers & Technology > Operating Systems > Solaris
  • #98 in Books > Computers & Technology > Operating Systems > Linux > Programming

More About the Author

Darryl Gove is a senior principal software engineer at Oracle. He works on performance analysis and optimisation of both applications and benchmarks. He is the author of the book "Solaris Application Programming", and one of the contributors to the book "OpenSPARC Internals". His latest book "Multicore Application Programming" came out in November 2010. He maintains a blog at http://www.darrylgove.com/

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfectly executed December 19, 2010

By jas mann

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Here is an author who is not only the consummate expert we expect when we buy such a book, but is likewise both an excellent writer and teacher. Technical material is presented in perfectly sized and easy to digest chunks, you will find no academic puffery here. Code examples are painstakingly minimal, so as to be easily and immediately grasped and to complement the text, rather than interrupt it. Would that more technical texts were presented this well, a real gem here.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good book with an odd Solaris bias March 4, 2011

By W. Doran

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Notice that the title contains "for Windows, Linux, and Oracle(r) Solaris" not "for Microsoft(r) Windows, Linux, and Oracle(r) Solaris". The author works for Oracle (via Sun). This results in an odd and at times distracting bias in the text. For example, in Chapter 1, the UltraSPARC T2 (aka niagara2) is used as the example modern processor instead of say the Intel CoreI7 (aka nehalem, westmere). Then there are many references to the Sun Studio compiler and specific compiler options. Yes, gcc and icc are covered although often after Sun Studio. The coverage of Oracle/Sun in this book does not match current market share, and sadly probably does not match future market share.

Bias aside, this is a very good book on practical multicore programming. Read the other two (as of this writing) reviews. They lay it on a bit thick, but I basically agree. My one gripe is that the author is overly fond of automatic parallelization and Sun Studio's autopar. Having used a Sun Fire server for years, I have tried and been underwhelmed by autopar. Anyone reading this book would not satisfied with autopar. Also, mixing automatic parallelization in the same chapter with OpenMP does OpenMP a disservice.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Great overview of a broad topic May 14, 2011

By dmc

Format:Paperback

Browsing through this book at the local bookstore, I found it to be a suitable road map for learning how to program multicore systems. There are several topics and technologies in this subject, and the book covers them broadly. I say this because the reader has to pursue each topic in depth through other resources. These are highlighted in the references section. (For example, to learn POSIX threads programming, I've followed through by studying Robbins and Robbins' "UNIX System Programming" and Kerrisk's "The Linux Programming Interface". As both these in turn point to Butenhof's book, I'll probably follow the trail there too ...) Thorough details on such things as NPTL, to the niggler's delight, are found beyond Gove's book.

"Multicore Application Programming" is useful for the aspiring system programmer.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars No advanced developer's library should be without this February 13, 2011

By Midwest Book Review

Format:Paperback

Multicore Application Programming for Windows, Linux, and Oracle Solaris offers a detailed, practical guide to high-performance multicore programming for developers who want to learn more about pitfalls and successes of multicore usage. From identifying good opportunities for using parallelism to sharing data and using automatic parallelization, this provides C programmers with a wide range of multicore ideas applicable to a range of operating systems. No advanced developer's library should be without this.