New Article: Rethinking Multi-Threaded Design Principles

We've just published a new article, Dibyendu Roy's "Rethinking Multi-Threaded Design Principles". Multi-threaded software engineering continues to gain attention from new audiences as the developer and management communities come to recognize the significance of the Multicore Challenge. The history of software and hardware has been one of ever increasing speed, memory, and software capability. The speed aspect is where we now face a problem. Increases in speed were historically tied to new technologies that enabled successful utilization of ever thinner chips. The problem today is that we're down to a rather small number of atoms. Since we can't shrink atoms themselves, it's a considerable technological challenge to make an individual chip faster. What can be done, however, is to put more cores on an individual chip, thus multipling the amount of work a single chip can perform, even though the processing speed of an individual core remains unchanged. While this strategy is a challenge for chip manufacturers, ultimately (when the typical home or small office machine starts having 8 or 16 cores) it will be an even bigger challenge to software firms: in order to make their applications run faster, they'll have to write the software in a threadsafe manner that also utilizes multiple threads for the major processing-intensive operations. Multithreaded programming has been around for a long time in J...

Date: March, 04 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/editor/archive/2010/03/04/new-article-rethinking-multi-threaded-design-principles

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