index.md

title	Parallel Programming in .NET
ms.custom
ms.date	03/30/2017
ms.prod	.net
ms.reviewer
ms.suite
ms.technology	dotnet-standard
ms.tgt_pltfrm
ms.topic	article
helpviewer_keywords	parallel programming
ms.assetid	4d83c690-ad2d-489e-a2e0-b85b898a672d
caps.latest.revision	19
author	rpetrusha
ms.author	ronpet
manager	wpickett
ms.workload	dotnet dotnetcore

Parallel Programming in .NET

Many personal computers and workstations have two or four cores (that is, CPUs) that enable multiple threads to be executed simultaneously. Computers in the near future are expected to have significantly more cores. To take advantage of the hardware of today and tomorrow, you can parallelize your code to distribute work across multiple processors. In the past, parallelization required low-level manipulation of threads and locks. [!INCLUDEvs_dev10_long] and the [!INCLUDEnet_v40_short] enhance support for parallel programming by providing a new runtime, new class library types, and new diagnostic tools. These features simplify parallel development so that you can write efficient, fine-grained, and scalable parallel code in a natural idiom without having to work directly with threads or the thread pool. The following illustration provides a high-level overview of the parallel programming architecture in the [!INCLUDEnet_v40_short].

Related Topics

Technology	Description
Task Parallel Library (TPL)	Provides documentation for the xref:System.Threading.Tasks.Parallel?displayProperty=nameWithType class, which includes parallel versions of For and ForEach loops, and also for the xref:System.Threading.Tasks.Task?displayProperty=nameWithType class, which represents the preferred way to express asynchronous operations.
Parallel LINQ (PLINQ)	A parallel implementation of LINQ to Objects that significantly improves performance in many scenarios.
Data Structures for Parallel Programming	Provides links to documentation for thread-safe collection classes, lightweight synchronization types, and types for lazy initialization.
Parallel Diagnostic Tools	Provides links to documentation for Visual Studio debugger windows for tasks and parallel stacks, and the Concurrency Visualizer, which consists of a set of views in the [!INCLUDEvsprvsts] Profiler that you can use to debug and to tune the performance of parallel code.
Custom Partitioners for PLINQ and TPL	Describes how partitioners work and how to configure the default partitioners or create a new partitioner.
Task Schedulers	Describes how schedulers work and how the default schedulers may be configured.
Lambda Expressions in PLINQ and TPL	Provides a brief overview of lambda expressions in C# and Visual Basic, and shows how they are used in PLINQ and the Task Parallel Library.
For Further Reading	Provides links to additional documentation and sample resources for parallel programming in the .NET Framework.

See Also

Patterns for Parallel Programming: Understanding and Applying Parallel Patterns with the .NET Framework 4
Samples for Parallel Programming with the .NET Framework