HELPERS - A LIBRARY SUPPORTING COMPUTATIONS USING HELPER THREADS

Files in this directory are Copyright 2013, 2014, 2016, 2018 Radford M. Neal.  

  The helpers library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
  the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
  (at your option) any later version.

  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
  GNU General Public License for more details.

  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
  with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
  51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.

The file COPYING contains the text of the GNU General Public License,
version 2.


The helpers library provides facilities by which a "master" thread can
schedule tasks to be done, perhaps by a "helper" thread, or perhaps by
the master itself.  Interaction of the master and helpers is currently
implemented using OpenMP, version 3.0 or 3.1.  This facility can also
be used to improve performance by merging deferred tasks even if
multithreading is not used.

The C interface is defined by helpers.h.  The C routines implementing
the helpers facility are in helpers.c.  Documentation regarding how an
application program should use this facility is in the file api-doc.
The file imp-doc has information on how the facility is implemented.

The "examples" directory contains example programs that demonstrate
many of the features.  See the README in that directory for details.


This software is available at github.com/radfordneal/helpers.

Radford Neal may be contacted at radfordneal@gmail.com.

This is the version of 2018-09-11.