Concurrency and Parallelism

Abstract

For many years, the processing power of computer systems increased exponentially. Processors have been getting faster with every model, and programs designed to challenge the hardware resources of an expensive workstation were being ported to laptops and handheld devices. This era came to an end several years ago, and today processors are not exponentially increasing in speed; they are exponentially increasing in number. Writing programs to take advantage of multiple processing cores hasn’t been easy when multi-processor systems were rare and expensive, and it hasn’t turned easy today, when even smartphones ship with dual- and quad-core processors.