Getting Started with the .NET Task Parallel Library
If you have a multi-core computer, chances are your first CPU does all the work while the others spend most of their time twiddling their electronic thumbs. Learn to unlock the idle power of your underused CPUs to greatly improve the performance of your applications.
by Rod Stephens
September 26, 2008
arallel programming has been around for decades, but unless you had access to special-purpose hardware, you've probably written mostly single CPU applications. You could distribute truly intensive applications across a network—but doing so was a lot of work and involved a lot of overhead.
For several years, programming tools have allowed you to use multiple threads in the same program. Multiple threads may be able to run on multiple CPUs within your computer so multi-threading sometimes provides nice speed improvements. Unfortunately, while multi-threading requires less overhead than distributing applications across a network, it's still fairly tricky.
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arallel programming has been around for decades, but unless you had access to special-purpose hardware, you've probably written mostly single CPU applications. You could distribute truly intensive applications across a network—but doing so was a lot of work and involved a lot of overhead.
