Multithreading Programming in C++ Training Course

Challenges and Concurrency Problems

• Hardware platform limitations - hardware threads, pipelines, cache coherence
• Fundamental concepts related to multithreaded programming (correctness of multithreaded programs, liveness, livelock, deadlock, race conditions, atomicity, memory models, Flynn's taxonomy)
• Available mechanisms in C++ for implementing multithreading and multiprocessing
• Standard library implementation - elements from C++14 to the present day (C++2a)
• Implementation available in Boost - differences compared to the standard library

Processes and Threads

• Multiprocess and multithreaded applications
• Operating system and threads (brief overview of available implementations)
• Process and thread synchronization mechanisms
• Structural implementation of synchronization
• Specifics of multithreading implementation in an object-oriented approach (role of the RAII pattern)

Memory Model in C++

• Objects and memory locations
• Operation scheduling and enforcement
• Relationships: synchronization, precedence, ordering of operations for atomic actions, release sequences
• Memory barriers
• Atomic operations

Thread Management in C++14 and Later

• std::thread class and thread execution
• Thread identification
• Thread joining and detachment
• Threads and standard containers
• Exception handling in C++14 threads

Mutual Exclusion and Critical Sections

• Basic principles of mutual exclusion
• Concepts (types) of available blocking objects
• Quick introduction to time handling in C++14 (chrono library)
• std::mutex, std::timed_mutex, std::shared_mutex classes and derivatives
• RAII pattern in lock handling (std::lock_guard, std::unique_lock)
• Deferred and dependent locks (std::lock)
• Lock and thread ownership
• Readers-writers problem
• One-time initialization
• Thread-local (private) memory (std::thread_local)

Thread Locking and Synchronization

• Semaphore operations
• Recursive locks
• Locks with defined locking levels
• Decision variables and cooperation with locks
• Implementation of active and passive barriers (Idle Waits, Busy Waits)
• Thread resumption
• Inter-thread communication (Actor and CSP models)

Asynchronous Tasks

• Asynchronous events and their handling
• Futures
• Promises
• Packaged tasks

Atomic Types

• Standard atomic types
• Universal atomic flag (std::atomic_flag)
• Class template "std::atomic<T>" and its specializations
• Utility functions (free functions) for std::atomic types

Specifics of Multithreaded API Design

• Designing structures using locks - coarse- and fine-grained locks
• Concurrency code efficiency - estimation and measurement techniques
• Data partitioning
• Scalability of solutions
• Error and exception handling in application architecture

Testing and Debugging Multithreaded Applications

• Code reviews for multithreaded operations
• Specifics of testing multithreaded applications
• Unit tests
• Increasing the probability of failure situations for testing
• Formal methods for testing multithreaded applications
• Multithreaded application architecture patterns and testing/debugging (overview)

Advanced Thread Management

• Dependent threads (Saga pattern)
• Avoiding data access contention
• Controlled thread stopping and interruption
• Interrupting blocking calls
• Interrupt handling
• Work stealing
• Interrupting tasks during application shutdown

Multithreaded Design Patterns

• Types and purposes of multithreaded patterns
• Application scope of patterns
• Thread Pool
• Active Object pattern
• Thread Safe Queue
• Producer-Consumer pattern
• Monitor pattern
• Multithreaded safety of GoF patterns