Introduction
In .NET Framework, there is a subset of libraries that is called Parallel Framework, often referred to as Parallel Framework Extensions (PFX), which was the name of the very first version of these libraries. Parallel Framework was released with .NET Framework 4.0 and consists of three major parts:
The Task Parallel Library (TPL)
Concurrent collections
Parallel LINQ or PLINQ
Until now, you have learned how to run several tasks in parallel and synchronize them with one another. In fact, we partitioned our program into a set of tasks and had different threads running different tasks. This approach is called task parallelism, and you have only been learning about task parallelism so far.
Imagine that we have a program that performs some heavy calculations over a big set of data. The easiest way to parallelize this program is to partition this set of data into smaller chunks, run the calculations needed over these chunks of data in parallel, and then aggregate the results of these calculations...
