Available parallel technologies in .Net

Question

I am new to .Net platform. I did a search and found that there are several ways to do parallel computing in .Net:

1. Parallel task in Task Parallel Library, which

Answer 1

Strictly speaking, the distinction between parallel, asynchronous and concurrent should be made here.

Parallel means that a "task" is split among several smaller sub-"tasks" that can be run at the same time. This requires a multi-core CPU or a multi-CPU computer, where each task has its dedicated core or CPU. Or multiple computers. PLINQ (data parallelism) and TPL (task parallelism) fall into this category.

Asynchronous means that tasks run without blocking each other. F#'s async expression, Rx, Begin/End pattern are all APIs for async programming.

Concurrency is a concept more broad than parallelization and asynchrony. Concurrency means that several "tasks" run at the same time, interacting with each other. But these "tasks" don't have to run on separate physical computing units, as is meant in parallelization. For example, multitasking operating systems can execute multiple processes concurrently even on single-core single-CPU computers, using time slices. Concurrency can be achieved for example with the Actor model and message passing (e.g. F#'s mailbox, Erlang processes (Retlang in .Net))

Threads are a relatively low-level concept compared to the concepts above. Threads are tasks running within a process, running concurrently and managed directly by the operating system's scheduler. You can implement parallelization when the operating system maps each thread to a separate core, or an Actor model by implementing message queuing, routing, etc on each thread.