Efficient use of Multi-core Technology in Interactive Desktop Applications

Abstract: The emergence of multi-core processors has successfully ended the era where applications could enjoy free and regular performance improvements without source code modifications. This thesis aims to gather experiences from the work of retrofitting parallelism into a desktop application originally written for sequential execution. The main contribution is the underlying theory and the performance evaluation, experiments and tests of the parallel software regions compared to its sequential counterparts. The feasibility is demonstrated as the theory is put into use when a complex commercially active desktop application is being rewritten to support parallelism. The thesis finds no simple guaranteed solution to the problem of making a serial application execute in parallel. However, experiments and tests proves that many of the evaluated methods offers tangible performance advantages compared to sequential execution.