[quantumleap]

The Threading Methodology used at Intel has four major steps: Analysis, Design & Implementation, Debugging, and Performance Tuning. These steps are used to create a multithreaded application from a serial base code. Besides the recent Patterns for Parallel Programming by Mattson, Sanders and Massingill, there hasn’t been much written about how to do the Design & Implementation part of the process.
Multithreaded programming is still more art than science. This article gives 8 Simple Rules that you can add to your palette of threading design methods. By following these rules, you will have more success in writing the best and most efficient threaded implementation of your applications.
Rule 1. Be sure you identify truly independent computations.
Rule 2. Implement concurrency at highest level possible.
Rule 3. Plan early for scalability to take advantage of increasing numbers of cores.
Rule 4. Make use of thread-safe libraries wherever possible.
Rule 5. Use the right threading model.
Rule 6. Never assume a particular order of execution.
Rule 7. Use thread-local storage whenever possible; associate locks to specific data, if needed.
Rule 8. Don’t be afraid to change the algorithm for a better chance of concurrency.!