Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> Sean Kelly wrote:
>> Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>>>
>>> Makes me think, how does one keep up with this? I mean, one who isn't (nor wishes to be) a hardware expert, but wants to keep up with the general developments in this area, thus maintaining an overview of it.
>>
>> comp.programming.threads is worth keeping an eye on, though the jargon can get a bit thick there at times.  The C++ committee is also working on a new memory model for C++, so any discussion there may be useful. The easiest way to keep an eye on this is follow the links from Hans Boehm's website  (http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/) though you could keep an eye on comp.std.c++ as well if you're having trouble staying awake at night.  Finally, any paper with Maurice Herlihy's name on it is a useful resource if you want a deeper understanding of some of these ideas and don't mind some research.  He's got a website with links to many of his papers, though IIRC some of them are hard to track down without an ACM membership.
> 
> Well, that's the thing, I just want to have some general knowledge about this area of hardware and concurrency/distributed-systems, not become an expert on it. My time to learn new things is limited (and I definitely have no trouble going to sleep :( ), so my priority goes for learning things that I have immediate need to use/become-involved. If I ever have the need to learn more in-depth I will.
> You see, concurrency is very important for people interested in server-side programming. But for multimedia programming, it's not that important. For now that is, as it seems that with the coming of multicore CPUs, concurrency is becoming more and more of a general software development topic, relevant even for non-intrinsically concurrent apps.

Sadly, I don't know of any more basic sources of information on this stuff.  David Butenhof's "Programming with POSIX Threads" is quite good for the basic concepts, but beyond that it's mostly research papers, wiki topics, etc.  But don't hesitate to ask on comp.programming.threads or here if you have a question.

Sean