ATHABASCA UNIVERSITY CONCURRENT PROGRAMMING: A CASE STUDY ON DUAL CORE COMPUTERS BY

Recent innovations in computing technology have resulted in the development of multi core CPU's which are capable of performing multiple tasks simultaneously. On the other hand, many algorithms are implemented sequentially, even though some tasks lend themselves to being able to be performed more efficiently in parallel on multi core CPU's. This essay presents a review of current literature in concurrent programming techniques, including Shared State Concurrency, Message Passing, Concurrency, Software Transactional Memory and Declarative Concurrency. Several programming languages are compared with respect to how concurrent programming is supported. A parallel implementation of the introsort algorithm is provided as a case study. The sorting time was measured on single and dual core CPU's for data sets of various sizes, resulting in 32 % improvement in total sort time for the concurrent version on the dual core computer. Although this demonstrates the benefits of programming for concurrency on multi core computers, it stands to be further improved. It is recommended that the techniques discussed be applied in practice in libraries of algorithms