Multi threaded programming

I found the talk: Plain Threads are the GOTO of todays computing by Hartmut Kaiser very interesting because I have been working on improving the multithreaded code in MOSEK recently. And is also thinking how MOSEK should deal with all the cores in the CPUs in the future. I agree with Hartmut something else than plain threads is needed.

Here are some potential replacements:

• Berkeley Unified Parallel C
• CheckedThreads  Source with a liberal license. Cilk like. Both C and C++.
• Cilk Plus Supported by Intel C, gcc and Clang.
• HPX C++ only.
• Occa. A unified approach to multithreaded languages. See also.
• OpenMP Supported by many compilers.
• Pfunc Cilk like features. Liberal license. Can be called from C but is C++.
• Starpu
• Threaded building blocks. C++ only.
• Wool  A pure C implementation that provides something very close to Cilk. 
• XKAAPI

Previously I have used OpenMP but I really dislike that. In my opinion it is somewhat ugly and you feel the Fortran origins. Recently I have played with Cilk which is very simple.

Checkedthreads seems like a good option if a simple C only tool can do the job. I have plan to try that at MOSEK.

Pfunc seems very powerful and there is ph.d. thesis about its design. The project might be semi-dead though.

Wool also seems very interesting. It is plain C and the author claims the spawn overhead is very low. There is also an older comparison with other task libraries.

Btw I biased towards tools that has no C++ bindings because currently MOSEK is plain C code. Adding a dependency on a C++ runtime library adds headaches.

Some common terminology when working on parallism is

• Fork-join parallel model
• Pthreads programming and tutorial