Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks

Your software needs to leverage multiple cores, handle thousands of users and terabytes of data, and continue working in the face of both hardware and software failure. Concurrency and parallelism are the keys, and Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks equips you for this new world. See how emerging technologies such as actors and functional programming address issues with traditional threads and locks development. Learn how to exploit the parallelism in your computer’s GPU and leverage clusters of machines with MapReduce and Stream Processing. And do it all with the confidence that comes from using tools that help you write crystal clear, high-quality code.

This book will show you how to exploit different parallel architectures to improve your code’s performance, scalability, and resilience. You’ll learn about seven concurrency models: threads and locks, functional programming, separating identity and state, actors, sequential processes, data parallelism, and the lambda architecture.

Learn about the perils of traditional threads and locks programming and how to overcome them through careful design and by working with the standard library. See how actors enable software running on geographically distributed computers to collaborate, handle failure, and create systems that stay up 24/7/365. Understand why shared mutable state is the enemy of robust concurrent code, and see how functional programming together with technologies such as Software Transactional Memory (STM) and automatic parallelism help you tame it.

You’ll learn about the untapped potential within every GPU and how GPGPU software can unleash it. You’ll see how to use MapReduce to harness massive clusters to solve previously intractable problems, and how, in concert with Stream Processing, big data can be tamed.

With an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each of the different models and hardware architectures, you’ll be empowered to tackle any problem with confidence.

What You Need:

The example code can be compiled and executed on *nix, OS X, or Windows. Instructions on how to download the supporting build systems are given in each chapter.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Concurrent or Parallel?

Parallel Architecture

Concurrency: Beyond Multiple Cores

The Seven Models

2. Threads and Locks

The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work

Day 1: Mutual Exclusion and Memory Models

Day 2: Beyond Intrinsic Locks

Day 3: On the Shoulders of Giants

Wrap-Up

3. Functional Programming

If It Hurts, Stop Doing It

Day 1: Programming Without Mutable State

Day 2: Functional Parallelism

Day 3: Functional Concurrency

Wrap-Up

4. The Clojure Way-Separating Identity from State

The Best of Both Worlds

Day 1: Atoms and Persistent Data Structures

Day 2: Agents and Software Transactional Memory

Day 3: In Depth

Wrap-Up

5. Actors

More Object-Oriented than Objects

Day 1: Messages and Mailboxes

Day 2: Error Handling and Resilience

Day 3: Distribution

Wrap-Up

6. Communicating Sequential Processes

Communication Is Everything

Day 1: Channels and Go Blocks

Day 2: Multiple Channels and 10

Day 3: Client-Side CSP

Wrap-Up

7. Data Parallelism

The Supercomputer Hidden in Your Laptop

Day 1: GPGPU Programming

Day 2: Multiple Dimensions and Work-Groups

Day 3: OpenCL and OpenGL-Keeping It on the GPU

Wrap-Up

8. The Lambda Architecture

Parallelism Enables Big Data

Day 1: Map Reduce

Day 2: The Batch Layer

Day 3: The Speed Layer

Wrap-Up

9. Wrapping Up

Where Are We Going?

Roads Not Taken

Over to You

About the Author

Paul Butcher has worked in diverse fields at all levels of abstraction, from microcode on bit-slice processors to high-level declarative programming, and all points in between. Paul’s experience comes from working for startups, where he’s had the privilege of collaborating with several great teams on cutting-edge technology. He is the author of “Debug It!.”