Foundations of Multithreaded, Parallel, and Distributed Programming

by Gregory R. Andrews

Book Overview

Greg Andrews teaches the fundamental concepts of multithreaded, parallel and distributed computing and relates them to the implementation and performance processes. He presents the appropriate breadth... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201357526
• ISBN13: 9780201357523
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: Pearson
• Length: 688 Pages
• Weight: 2.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 7.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

An Excellent Book

I used this book for Dr. Andrews' parallel computing class many years ago and LOVED this book. This book covers a wide ranging topics of parallel computing and is a good enough reference for 99% people out there. The book is extremely useful in that it provides actual working example codes for nearly all the topics covered, in C or Java or both. The codes are also very small, in most cases less than a page. This is very important because a lot cases such as multiple readers single writers are not easy to code from scratch and could easily have synchronization problems unless one has strong overall grasp of the concept. This book does very good analysis of potential pitfalls of them. Even if you already knew the concepts, this book provides a valuable reference and code templates. Some part of the book may seem to be pseudo code to some people since Dr. Andrews uses the MPD language (which is on top of C) for a far easier time dealing with many of the computing issues. Although I have never used to MPD language, I find the syntax useful in understanding many concepts Dr. Andrews is trying to explain, such as how to partition work into small tasks.

an excellent intro to medium book on parallel programming

The book provides all material needed for a beginner to easily acquire knowledge required for development and beginner's research in the field of parallel computation. It's written though not for a beginner in programming, solid basics and initial knowledge of OS internals are prerequisites. I found it's easy to read and understand with a mass of useful examples and with coverage of MPI and Java. This was especially important to since it bridges the theory in the earlier sections with practical implementations using production environment tools. In overall I strongly recommend it for those who are new to the field. For a more deep discussion on parallel algorithms one may want to look at F.T. Leighton's "Intro to Parallel Algorithms and Architectures: Arrays, Trees, Hypercubes" - that one is much more technical though.