Effective Concurrency: Avoid Exposing Concurrency – Hide It Inside Synchronous Methods

This month’s Effective Concurrency column, Avoid Exposing Concurrency – Hide It Inside Synchronous Methods, is now live on DDJ’s website.

From the article:

You have a mass of existing code and want to add concurrency. Where do you start?

Let’s say you need to migrate existing code to take advantage of concurrent execution or scale on parallel hardware. In that case, you’ll probably find yourself in one of these two common situations, which are actually more similar than different:

• Migrating an application: You’re an application developer, and you want to migrate your existing synchronous application to be able to benefit from concurrency.
• Migrating a library or framework: You’re a developer on a team that produces a library or framework used by other teams or external customers, and you want to let the library take advantage of concurrency on behalf of the application without requiring application code rewrites.

You have a mountain of opportunities and obstacles before you. Where do you start?

I hope you enjoy it. Finally, here are links to previous Effective Concurrency columns:

The Pillars of Concurrency (Aug 2007)

How Much Scalability Do You Have or Need? (Sep 2007)

Use Critical Sections (Preferably Locks) to Eliminate Races (Oct 2007)

Apply Critical Sections Consistently (Nov 2007)

Avoid Calling Unknown Code While Inside a Critical Section (Dec 2007)

Use Lock Hierarchies to Avoid Deadlock (Jan 2008)

Break Amdahl’s Law! (Feb 2008)

Going Superlinear (Mar 2008)

Super Linearity and the Bigger Machine (Apr 2008)

Interrupt Politely (May 2008)

Maximize Locality, Minimize Contention (Jun 2008)

Choose Concurrency-Friendly Data Structures (Jul 2008)

The Many Faces of Deadlock (Aug 2008)

Lock-Free Code: A False Sense of Security (Sep 2008)

Writing Lock-Free Code: A Corrected Queue (Oct 2008)

Writing a Generalized Concurrent Queue (Nov 2008)

Understanding Parallel Performance (Dec 2008)

Measuring Parallel Performance: Optimizing a Concurrent Queue (Jan 2009)

volatile vs. volatile (Feb 2009)

Sharing Is the Root of All Contention (Mar 2009)

Use Threads Correctly = Isolation + Asynchronous Messages (Apr 2009)

Use Thread Pools Correctly: Keep Tasks Short and Nonblocking (Apr 2009)

Eliminate False Sharing (May 2009)

Break Up and Interleave Work to Keep Threads Responsive (Jun 2009)

The Power of “In Progress” (Jul 2009)

Design for Manycore Systems (Aug 2009)

Avoid Exposing Concurrency – Hide It Inside Synchronous Methods (Oct 2009)