Tutorial: Multithreaded Programming with pthreads

Why is it that most programs are sequential? One guess could be the relative dominance of uniprocessing machines available to programmers. Multithreading a program on a uniprocessor machine in most cases does not yield enough performance gains to merit days, weeks, or months worth of work to thread code. Another guess is that most of us think in a sequential manner. Parallelizing our thoughts does not come naturally nor is it an easy task.

However, times have changed and many papers have been written on multithreading. Some advocate the use of threads, while others do not. With the increasing popularity of Symmetric-Multiprocessing machines, programming multithreaded code is a skill worth learning.

We will dive into the world of threads with some a little bit of "theory" first.