CREATING MULTITHREADED PTOGRAMS IN C++

Abstract

For many years, the increase in computing power of modern devices is achieved not by increasing the clock frequency and bandwidth of CPUs, but by using hyper-threaded and multicore architectures. This simple change in approach to the CPU design led to dramatic changes in the organization of computing and became a turning point for software developers. Software that is going to take advantage of the increased computing power of multi-core architectures must be designed to be able to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. When covering the topic of parallel/simultaneous computing, scientists and IT professionals use two terms: (1) parallelism and (2) concurrency. A third important term when considering parallel/simultaneous computing is “multithreading”. In C++, the two most common ways to implement parallelism are concurrency and parallelism itself. Although they can be used in other programming languages, C++ stands out for its ability to use concurrent computations with lower-than-average utilization of general machine resources, as well as its ability to execute complex instructions. The C++11 standard introduced support for multi-threaded programs. The C++ standard recognized the existence of multithreading in the language and provided components for writing multithreaded programs in the <thread> library. This made it possible to write multithreaded programs in C++ without relying on platform-specific extensions and enabled the creation of portable multithreaded code with guaranteed behavior. The <thread> library provides extensive opportunities for organizing parallel and concurrent calculations, it also contains the C++ memory model, conditional variables, mutexes, etc. for thread synchronization. The article analyzes the possibilities of writing programs in the C++ using multiple threads for parallel and concurrent execution of tasks. It also considers the features of the C++ and the tools of the <thread> library that make parallelism and concurrency possible.