Finite Element Method

In addition, there’s a certain art to the application of threads. C++ is designed to allow you to create as many objects as you need to solve your problem—at least in theory. (Creating millions of objects for an engineering finite-element analysis, for example, might not be practical.) However, there is usually an upper bound to the number of threads you’ll want to create, because at some number, threads may become balky. This critical point can be difficult to detect and will often depend on the OS and thread library; it could be fewer than a hundred or in the thousands. As you often create only a handful of threads to solve a problem, this is typically not much of a limit; but in a more general design it becomes a constraint. Regardless of how simple threading can seem using a particular language or library, consider it a black art. There’s always something you haven’t considered that can bite you when you least expect it. (For example, note that because the dining philosophers problem can be adjusted so that deadlock rarely happens, you can get the impression that everything is OK.) An appropriate quote comes from Guido Van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language: In any project that is multi-threaded, most bugs will come from threading issues ...»