Parallel Programming, a book by Paul McKenney

paulmck.livejournal.com

46 points·alexkon··6 comments

I've followed the development of this book for several years, and it has progressed quite well in that time. It currently has a good combination of "documentation nobody else ever bothered to write" on many forms of synchronization, from the simple to the cutting edge, with a bit of a peek beyond that. It has a ways to go before it could become a publishable book, but by the standards of software documentation it represents one of the best references I've seen.

I need a good writeup on parallel (distributed?) data structures, that is, ways of storing and accessing lists and such across multiple nodes. I flipped to that section of the book and it was blank. Plus, this seems to assume shared memory. Does anyone have a good source? Does one even exist?

Not sure if this is what you want, but Chris Okasaki's "Purely Functional Data Structures" are data-structures that can be accessed in multiple threads because changes result in new versions.

http://www.amazon.com/Purely-Functional-Structures-Chris-Oka...

The data structures in that book are also geared towards shared memory; actually, it doesn't cover parallel programming at all, it's just that functional data structures happen to be a good fit for concurrent access in shared memory systems.

You might have more success finding what you want in HPC literature, or maybe in the Erlang community.

That said, it's a decent book, although not exactly a light read; I did struggle to follow some of the numerous proofs. You'll probably find it easier if you have a CompSci background.

Ouch! Sorry for the down-vote. I wanted to upvote you and the touch on my android phone was a mis-hit.

Direct link to book: http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/paulmck/perfbook/p...

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