Practical Lock-free Concurrency (in C++)

Date: This event took place live on April 19 2016

Presented by: Fedor Pikus



Duration: Approximately 90 minutes.

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Description:

In this webcast, Fedor Pikus uses practical examples of (mostly) lock-free data structures, with actual implementations and performance measurements, to cover the fundamentals of lock-free vs. lock-based programming. We'll explore the reasons to write lock-free programs (as well as the reasons not to). We'll learn, or be reminded of, the basic tools of lock-free programming and consider a few simple examples before trying something more difficult, just to see how insanely complex the problems can get. Having been burned by the complexities of generic lock-free algorithms, we'll take a more practical approach: assuming we are not all writing STL, we'll try to outline some limitations we can live with. Even if the specific limitations and simplifying assumptions used in this talk do not apply to your problem, you'll leave understanding how to find such assumptions and take advantage of them, because chances are, you can use lock-free techniques to write code that works for you and is much simpler than what you were writing before.

About Fedor G. Pikus

Fedor G. Pikus is a chief engineering scientist in the Design-to-Silicon division of Mentor Graphics, where his responsibilities include planning the long-term technical direction of Calibre products, directing and training the engineers who work on these products, the design and architecture of the software, and research in new design and software technologies. Previously, Fedor was a senior software engineer at Google and the chief software architect for Calibre PERC, LVS, and DFM at Mentor Graphics. He joined Mentor Graphics in 1998 when he transitioned from academic research in computational physics to the software industry.