Multicore programming: what's necessary to do it?

java c windows multicore
Nope picture Nope · Oct 19, 2009 · Viewed 7.8k times · Source

I have a quadcore processor and I would really like to take advantage of all those cores when I'm running quick simulations. The problem is I'm only familiar with the small Linux cluster we have in the lab and I'm using Vista at home.

What sort of things do I want to look into for multicore programming with C or Java? What is the lingo that I want to google?

Thanks for the help.

Answer

Alex Martelli picture Alex Martelli · Oct 19, 2009

The key word is "threading" - wouldn't work in a cluster, but it will be just fine in a single multicore machine (actually, on any kind of Windows, much better in general than spawning multiple processes -- Windows' processes are quite heavy-weight compared to Linux ones). Not quite that easy in C, very easy in Java -- for example, start here!

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