Concurrency & Multithreading

Question 1

Thread

Answer 1

smallest unit of execution in a process;
can run independently on CPU cores.

Question 2

Process

Answer 2

isolated program instance with its own memory space

Question 3

Parallelism

Answer 3

Executing multiple operations simultaneously to improve throughput.

Question 4

Concurrency

Answer 4

Structuring a program to manage multiple tasks that may overlap in time.

Question 5

Synchronization

Answer 5

coordinating access to shared resources

Question 6

Thread Pool

Answer 6

fixed set of threads used to execute multiple tasks;
reduces overhead of creating threads repeatedly.

Question 7

Mutex

Answer 7

Mutual exclusion object to protect shared data;
ensures only one thread accesses critical section at a time.

Question 8

Spinlock

Answer 8

Busy-wait lock;
low-latency for short critical sections, but wastes CPU cycles.

Question 9

Semaphore

Answer 9

Controls access to a resource with a counter;
useful for producer-consumer patterns.

Question 10

Condition Variable

Answer 10

Allows threads to wait for a condition;
used in combination with mutexes.

Question 11

Atomic Operations

Answer 11

Lock-free operations on single variables
avoid mutex overhead.

Question 12

Thread-local Storage
(TLS)

Answer 12

Data unique to each thread;
avoids sharing and contention.

Question 13

Race Condition

Answer 13

Multiple threads accessing shared data without proper synchronization

Question 14

Deadlock

Answer 14

Two or more threads waiting indefinitely on each other’s locks

Question 15

std::async

Answer 15

Launches a function asynchronously (potentially on a separate thread) and returns a future representing the eventual result

Question 16

std::future

Answer 16

A read-only placeholder for a result that will become available later.

Question 17

std::promise

Answer 17

Sets a value or exception that a future can retrieve.

Question 18

scheduling

Answer 18

process by which the operating system decides which threads or processes run on CPU cores and for how long

Question 19

context switching

Answer 19

process by which the CPU saves the state of the currently running thread or process and loads the state of another to resume execution