Which of the following best describes the 'producer-consumer problem' in parallel processing?
Question 2
In a multicore processor, what is the primary purpose of a 'memory barrier' (or 'fence') instruction?
Question 3
Consider a parallel program with a critical section protected by a mutex. If multiple threads attempt to acquire the mutex simultaneously, which of the following best describes the behavior of the threads that fail to acquire the mutex?
Question 4
Which of the following is a primary characteristic of a 'NUMA' (Non-Uniform Memory Access) architecture in parallel processing?
Question 5
Consider a parallel program where a shared counter is incremented by multiple threads. To ensure atomicity and correctness, a compare-and-swap (CAS) operation is often used. If the current value of the counter is $C$, and a thread wants to increment it to $C+1$, what are the arguments typically passed to a CAS operation?
