Non-blocking I O

	Non-blocking I O Non-blocking or nonblocking may refer to: ''non-blocking I/O'', see asynchronous I/O Non-blocking synchronization * Nonblocking minimal spanning switch {{Disambiguation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu]
	Asynchronous I/O In computer science, asynchronous I/O (also non-sequential I/O) is a form of input/output processing that permits other processing to continue before the transmission has finished. A name used for asynchronous I/O in the Windows API is overlapped I/O. Input and output (I/O) operations on a computer can be extremely slow compared to the processing of data. An I/O device can incorporate mechanical devices that must physically move, such as a hard drive seeking a track to read or write; this is often orders of magnitude slower than the switching of electric current. For example, during a disk operation that takes ten milliseconds to perform, a processor that is clocked at one gigahertz could have performed ten million instruction-processing cycles. A simple approach to I/O would be to start the access and then wait for it to complete. But such an approach (called synchronous I/O, or blocking I/O) would block the progress of a program while the communication is in progress, leaving ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu]
	Non-blocking Synchronization In computer science, an algorithm is called non-blocking if failure or suspension of any thread cannot cause failure or suspension of another thread; for some operations, these algorithms provide a useful alternative to traditional blocking implementations. A non-blocking algorithm is lock-free if there is guaranteed system-wide progress, and wait-free if there is also guaranteed per-thread progress. "Non-blocking" was used as a synonym for "lock-free" in the literature until the introduction of obstruction-freedom in 2003. The word "non-blocking" was traditionally used to describe telecommunications networks that could route a connection through a set of relays "without having to re-arrange existing calls" (see Clos network). Also, if the telephone exchange "is not defective, it can always make the connection" (see nonblocking minimal spanning switch). Motivation The traditional approach to multi-threaded programming is to use locks to synchronize access to shared resourc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu]