ArrayFire in Threaded Applications

In this chapter, we will looking at how to use ArrayFire in multi-threaded programs. We shall go over the details in the following order.

Move an Array to thread

In this section, we are going to create an Array on main thread and move it to a child thread, modify it and then print it from the child thread.

{{#include ../../src/core/array.rs:move_array_to_thread}}

Now, let's expand the earlier example to do a bunch of arithmetic operations in parallel on multiple threads using the same Array objects.

{{#include ../../src/core/array.rs:read_from_multiple_threads}}

Given below is the definition of the enum Op we used in the example for illustration simplicity.

{{#include ../../src/core/array.rs:multiple_threads_enum_def}}

Let us further expand the earlier example by accumulating the results of the arithmetic operations into a single Array object.

The code will differ from earlier section in couple of locations:

In the main thread, we wrap the accumulating Array in a read-write lock (std::sync::RwLock) which is in turn wrapped in an atomically reference counted counter a.k.a std::sync::Arc.
In the children threads, we use the guarded objects returned by RwLock's write method to access the accumulator Array.

{{#include ../../src/core/array.rs:access_using_rwlock}}

In this section, we shall modify the example to use channel instead of data sharing.

{{#include ../../src/core/array.rs:accum_using_channel}}