I am reading the excellent article on Parallel extensions by Joe Albahari. He says,
Leveraging multiple cores is easy for most server applications, where each thread can independently handle a separate client request, but is harder on the desktop — because it typically requires that you take your computationally intensive code and do the following:
- Partition it into small chunks.
- Execute those chunks in parallel via multithreading.
- Collate the results as they become available, in a thread-safe and performant manner.
Although you can do all of this with the classic multithreading constructs, it’s awkward — particularly the steps of partitioning and collating. A further problem is that the usual strategy of locking for thread safety causes a lot of contention when many threads work on the same data at once.
The PFX libraries have been designed specifically to help in these scenarios.
I am wondering how PFX reduces the contension?
AFAIK, threads are managed by the operating system and OS is responsible for providing and releasing locks. Everything else like PFX are abstractions on top of this which handles the locking well and tries to do the work with very minimal lock. I guess this is possible with even directly manipulating threads and locking carefully to avoid contension.
Is this correct? Or is there a better way to do thread safe operation with out using locks?