A race condition occurs in multithreading when more than one thread writes to memory (i.e., changes a variable) simultaneously. This results in undefined or otherwise non-deterministic behaviour and we always want to avoid these.

How do we protect against race conditions? We should ensure that each thread doesn’t access shared memory at the same time.

  • One way we can do this is by putting data inside vectors when running parallel loops and keeping access to the specific iteration of the loop. By doing this, each thread accesses its own part of the vector and doesn’t interfere with others.
  • Make sure that nothing being written has a higher scope (i.e., should be local to the loop). If this is the case, the code should be refactored to avoid this.
  • We can use atomics and mutexes to guarantee protection of variables.

We say that critical sections are pieces of code that access a shared resource. We cannot make any assumptions about how the thread will be scheduled. In critical assumptions, we have to assume that the program can pre-empt in any order such that it results in non-deterministic behaviour.

map reduce

  • independently do an operation in parallel on each thread
  • at the very end, when everything is done computing, you combine the results on a main thread