Concurrency and Application Design

In the early days of computing, the maximum amount of work per unit of time that a computer could perform was determined by the clock speed of the CPU. But as technology advanced and processor designs became more compact, heat and other physical constraints started to limit the maximum clock speeds of processors. And so, chip manufacturers looked for other ways to increase the total performance of their chips. The solution they settled on was increasing the number of processor cores on each chip. By increasing the number of cores, a single chip could execute more instructions per second without increasing the CPU speed or changing the chip size or thermal characteristics. The only problem was how to take advantage of the extra cores.

In order to take advantage of multiple cores, a computer needs software that can do multiple things simultaneously. For a modern, multitasking operating system like OS X or iOS, there can be a hundred or more programs running at any given time, so scheduling each program on a different core should be possible. However, most of these programs are either system daemons or background applications that consume very little real processing time. Instead, what is really needed is a way for individual applications to make use of the extra cores more effectively.

The traditional way for an application to use multiple cores is to create multiple threads. However, as the number of cores increases, there are problems with threaded solutions. The biggest problem is that threaded code does not scale very well to arbitrary numbers of cores. You cannot create as many threads as there are cores and expect a program to run well. What you would need to know is the number of cores that can be used efficiently, which is a challenging thing for an application to compute on its own. Even if you manage to get the numbers correct, there is still the challenge of programming for so many threads, of making them run efficiently, and of keeping them from interfering with one another.

So, to summarize the problem, there needs to be a way for applications to take advantage of a variable number of computer cores. The amount of work performed by a single application also needs to be able to scale dynamically to accommodate changing system conditions. And the solution has to be simple enough so as to not increase the amount of work needed to take advantage of those cores. The good news is that Apple’s operating systems provide the solution to all of these problems, and this chapter takes a look at the technologies that comprise this solution and the design tweaks you can make to your code to take advantage of them. 

 

https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/General/Conceptual/ConcurrencyProgrammingGuide/ConcurrencyandApplicationDesign/ConcurrencyandApplicationDesign.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40008091-CH100-SW2