By Michael Wong
Parallel programming can be used to take advance of multi-core and heterogeneous architectures and can significantly increase the performance of software. It has gained a reputation for being difficult, but is it really? Modern C++ has gone a long way to making parallel programming easier and more accessible; providing both high-level and low-level abstractions. C++11 introduced the C++ memory model and standard threading library which includes threads, futures, promises, mutexes, atomics and more. C++17 takes this further by providing high level parallel algorithms; parallel implementations of many standard algorithms; and much more is expected in C++20. The introduction of the parallel algorithms also opens C++ to supporting non-CPU architectures, such as GPU, FPGAs, APUs and other accelerators.
This talk will show you the fundamentals of parallelism; how to recognise when to use parallelism, how to make the best choices and common parallel patterns such as reduce, map and scan which can be used over and again. It will show you how to make use of the C++ standard threading library, but it will take this further by teaching you how to extend parallelism to heterogeneous devices, using the SYCL programming model to implement these patterns on a GPU using standard C++.
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