How do I spawn threads on different CPU cores?

Question

Let\'s say I had a program in C# that did something computationally expensive, like encoding a list of WAV files into MP3s. Ordinarily I would encode the files one at a time

Answer 1

Where each thread goes is generally handled by the OS itself...so generate 4 threads on a 4 core system and the OS will decide which cores to run each on, which will usually be 1 thread on each core.

Answer 2

You shouldn't have to worry about doing this yourself. I have multithreaded .NET apps running on dual-quad machines, and no matter how the threads are started, whether via the ThreadPool or manually, I see a nice even distribution of work across all cores.

Answer 3

you cannot do this, as only operating system has the privileges to do it. If you will decide it.....then it will be difficult to code applications. Because then you also need to take care for inter-processor communication. critical sections. for each application you have to create you own semaphores or mutex......to which operating system gives a common solution by doing it itself.......

Answer 4

Don't bother doing that.

Instead use the Thread Pool. The thread pool is a mechanism (actually a class) of the framework that you can query for a new thread.

When you ask for a new thread it will either give you a new one or enqueue the work until a thread get freed. In that way the framework is in charge on deciding wether it should create more threads or not depending on the number of present CPUs.

Edit: In addition, as it has been already mentioned, the OS is in charge of distributing the threads among the different CPUs.