parallel processing

[divinginthesky]

My question is to know how sophisticated is C for programming in parallel, all what I know is that C is sequential until know. Do you know if there have been some attends or versions of C to program in parallel.

I know that Haskell is there but you have to know to know something called Functional Programming.

Currently, Intel and AMD are using dual or quak cores but I can sense that they are still not using all of those cores. They might be sending a whole task to one core and the next to another core, but they are not parallelizing a task. It is hard to split one task when there are so many dependencies between data.

There are some algorithms already implemented in hardware but that is not parallel yet.

Well if somebody know about it. Let me know. Either if C is working on it or any other usefull information regardig this interesting topic. I am all ears, that is not a problem...

Thank you for your time.

Mario

[JosAH]

Have a look at the pthread library; it is portable and offers multiple threading for your C programs in a simple way.

kind regards,

Jos

[donbock]

To the best of my knowledge, the "volatile" keyword is the only feature of the C language itself that has anything to do with parallel processing.

The real question is what support your operating system provides for parallel processing; and whether you have "C bindings" for those operating system features. That is, C-callable library functions to make use of the operating system features.

It would be possible to write your own nonpreemptive multi-thread environment that doesn't rely on the operating system (after all, many operating systems are written in C); but that would be a huge undertaking. I don't think that's what you're talking about.

[donbock]

@donbock
OK, maybe not huge ...

for (;;) {
   thread1();
   thread2();
   ...
   threadN();
   }

... but the effort grows fairly quickly as you make this framework more flexible.

The thread functions shown above are little state machines: each time you call one it does a different portion of its overall task and then returns.