Thread management advice - Is TPL a good idea?
- by Ian
I'm hoping to get some advice on the use of thread managment and hopefully the task parallel library, because I'm not sure I've been going down the correct route. Probably best is that I give an outline of what I'm trying to do.
Given a Problem I need to generate a Solution using a heuristic based algorithm. I start of by calculating a base solution, this operation I don't think can be parallelised so we don't need to worry about.
Once the inital solution has been generated, I want to trigger n threads, which attempt to find a better solution. These threads need to do a couple of things:
They need to be initalized with a different 'optimization metric'. In other words they are attempting to optimize different things, with a precedence level set within code. This means they all run slightly different calculation engines. I'm not sure if I can do this with the TPL..
If one of the threads finds a better solution that the currently best known solution (which needs to be shared across all threads) then it needs to update the best solution, and force a number of other threads to restart (again this depends on precedence levels of the optimization metrics).
I may also wish to combine certain calculations across threads (e.g. keep a union of probabilities for a certain approach to the problem). This is probably more optional though.
The whole system needs to be thread safe obviously and I want it to be running as fast as possible.
I tried quite an implementation that involved managing my own threads and shutting them down etc, but it started getting quite complicated, and I'm now wondering if the TPL might be better. I'm wondering if anyone can offer any general guidance?
Thanks...
