Good concurrency article

Here's a good article on code concurrency on MSDN, written by Joe Duffy, a concurrency-obsessed Microsoftie whose (mostly concurrency-on-Win32 related) blog where I found the reference is otherwise here.

While the article talks about CLR when it brings up examples, the discussion is actually generic enough to be of interest even if you write code that targets the JVM. It covers many aspects and pitfalls that you need to keep in mind when developing parallel(izable) applications. You even get few theoretical equations you can use to calculate the optimal number of threads to use as well as the maximum achievable performance increase through parallelization. (Assuming you can figure out the values of the variables in those equations for your system... ahem...) At the bottom of the page, there's a box named "Recommended Reading" which links to three more articles that look like they're also worth giving a shot.

Also on MSDN, Jeffrey Richter (the guy who wrote "Advanced Windows", a book that taught me Windows programming back in 1995 (together with Petzold's) and was the first technical book I came across that was also full of good jokes) writes about the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime, a CLR library that promises to make writing concurrent code much easier than it is "the manual way" (read: managing your threads and synchronization on your own; y'know, that which used to be the only way). What's interesting is that he also points out how concurrency is especially of importance in robotics applications, where there is really a great deal of processing going in parallel - all data coming from different sensors, multiple motoric instructions, etc. I also learned that Microsoft apparently has a product called "Microsoft Robotics Studio" targetted for writing software for robots. Hm...