ART OF MULTIPROCESSOR PROGRAMMING, THE

The computer industry is in the midst of a fundamental change. The change is from architectures founded on single-processor chips to those with multiprocessor chips. This will in turn require a fundamental change in how programs are written. Multiprocessor programming, also known as Multicore programming, requires new principles, algorithms, and programming tools. Multicore programming has been practiced on single processor machines for some time. This has been the narrow domain of specialists in high performance computing up till now. When multicore processing is performed on the new crop of multiprocessor machines though, it becomes much more complex. The key difference is the need to understand how separate processors coordinate with one another, which is called multiprocessor synchronization. This book promises to be the first comprehensive presentation of the principles and tools available for programming multiprocessor machines. It will be of immediate use to programmers working with the new architectures. For example, the next generation of computer game consoles will all be multiprocessor-based, and the game industry is currently struggling to understand how to address the programming challenges presented by these machines.
This change in the industry is so fundamental that it is certain to require a significant response by universities, and courses on multicore programming will become a staple of computer science curriculums.
The authors are well known and respected in this community and both teach and conduct research in this area. Prof. Maurice Herlihy is on the faculty of Brown University. He is the recipient of the 2003 Dijkstra Prize in distributed computing.Prof. Nir Shavit is on the faculty of Tel-Aviv University and a member of the technical staff at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. In 2004 they shared the Gödel Prize, the highest award in theoretical computer science.