Chapter 3. Dividing C Programs into Multiple Tasks

Chapter 3. Dividing C++ Programs into Multiple Tasks

"Hence, whatever parallel processes may be going on at a lower (neural) level, at the symbolic level the human mind is fundamentally a serial machine, accomplishing its work through temporal sequences of processes, each typically requiring hundreds of milliseconds for execution."

” Herbert A Simon, The Machine As Mind

In this Chapter

• Process: A Definition

• Anatomy of a Process

• Process States

• Process Scheduling

• Context Switching

• Creating a Process

• Terminating a Process

• Process Resources

• What are Asynchronous and Synchronous Processes?

• Dividing the Program into Tasks

• Summary

Concurrency in a C++ program is accomplished by factoring your program into either multiple processes or multiple threads. While there are variations on how the logic for a C++ program can be organized (e.g, within objects, functions, generic templates), the options for (with the exception of instruction level) parallelization is accounted for through the use of multiple processes and threads. This chapter focuses on the notion of a process and how C++ programs can be divided into multiple processes.