Parallelization of Sequential Applications using .NET Framework 4.5

Sammanfattning: Modern processor construction has taken a new turn in that adding on more cores to processors appears to be the norm instead of simply relying on clock speed improvements. Much of the responsibility of writing efficient appli-cations has thus been moved from the hardware designers to the software developers. However, issues related to scalability, synchronization, data dependencies and debugging makes this troublesome for developers. By using the .NET Framework 4.5, a lot of the mentioned issues are alleviated through the use of the parallel extensions including TPL, PLINQ and other constructs designed specifically for highly concurrent applications. Anal-ysis, profiling and debugging of parallel applications has also been made less problematic in that the Visual Studio2012 IDE provides such functionality to a great extent. In this thesis, the parallel extensions as well as explicit threading techniques are evaluated along with a parallelization attempt on an application called the LTF/Reduce Interpreter by the company Norconsult Astando AB. The application turned out to be highly I/O dependent but even so, the parallel extensions proved useful as the running times of the parallelized parts were lowered by a factor of about 3.5–4.1.