As Scott M. Fulton, III states in his article Everyone talk at once. In perhaps the most significant development in the brief history of the field of implicit parallelism in computing, one of Microsoft’s development teams announced last Friday that the next .NET Framework 4.0 will include the so-called Parallel Extensions as a standard feature. This after the Extensions were first introduced in a Community Technology Preview last November.
The significance of these extensions is that they enable existing .NET languages (today, most predominantly, C#) to incorporate implicit parallelism directly in programs. In other words, rather than simply write ordinary procedural code and use compiler switches to determine whether code can be forked into parallel threads, a developer can use entirely new syntax to invoke methods that execute multiple threads concurrently.
From MSDNs article Optimize Managed Code For Multi-Core Machines we learn that theTask Parallel Library (TPL) is designed to make it much easier to write managed code that can automatically use multiple processors. Using the library, you can conveniently express potential parallelism in existing sequential code, where the exposed parallel tasks will be run concurrently on all available processors. Usually this results in significant speedups.
TPL is being created as a collaborative effort by Microsoft® Research, the Microsoft Common Language Runtime (CLR) team, and the Parallel Computing Platform team. TPL is a major component of the Parallel FX library, the next generation of concurrency support for the Microsoft .NET Framework.
Happy coding!
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