The purpose of this book is to help you program shared-memory parallel systems without risking your sanity. Nevertheless, you should think of the information in this book as a foundation on which to build, rather than as a completed cathedral. Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to help make further progress in the exciting field of parallel programming-progress that will in time render this book obsolete.
Parallel programming in the 21st century is no longer focused solely on science, research, and grand-challenge projects. And this is all to the good, because it means that parallel programming is becoming an engineering discipline. Therefore, as befits an engineering discipline, this book examines specific parallel-programming tasks and describes how to approach them. In some surprisingly common cases, these tasks can be automated.
This book is written in the hope that presenting the engineering discipline underlying successful parallel-programming …
