Presburger Arithmetic and Its Use in Verification

Chapter 2
Multicore parallelism on F# and .NET
framework
The chapter starts with a brief overview of multicore parallelism. Although multicore
parallelism is a special case of parallel processing which performs on the
multicore architecture, the architecture actually has a huge influence on how multicore
parallelism is done and what we can achieve. Later we introduce parallelism
constructs by a series of familiar examples, we shall see that the functional paradigm
is suitable and easily used to write correct parallel implementations.
2.1 Multicore parallelism: a brief overview
The section describes some useful concepts which will be used throughout the report.
Although these concepts are terms of parallel processing, they should be understood
in the specific context of multicore parallelism. We also present the architecture of
multicore computers because it is essential and has its influence on what we can
achieve in multicore parallelism.
2.1.1 Platform
Parallel computing is usually classified by platforms where they are executed. A
platform could be a cluster of nodes where coordination is done by message passing
or a single machine with multiple cores coordinating in parallel using shared
memory. In this work, parallel processing is done on a multicore platform, so
shared-memory parallel programming is used by default here. One thing needed
to clarify is we focus on parallelism rather than concurrency. By parallelism, we
mean to exploit all system resources to speedup computation as much as possible, so
performance is the most important goal. This is different from concurrency where
different jobs may be executed at the same time and may not block each other.
Moreover, multicore is rather new compared to other parallel platforms so results
on those platform require careful justification. The structure of multicore comput-
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