c# parallelize simulation

I have a simulation engine that I would like to parallelize first and later develop as a web service in C#. This is an intensive simulation that requires a lot of CPU and RAM and I would like to split each run on a separate thread. To give you a better idea the simulation can run 100 runs and for each run I collect some results. It would be st开发者_运维问答raightforward to collect the results from each run and then collate them into one big file. So if I have a multi-core machine with 4 cores for example the idea is to run 4 runs on each core and then another 4 ... etc. I have read a few things about Parallel Extensions in the newer version of .net. Could I achieve the same things in 3.5 or would it be better to move to 4.0? Also anything to watch out if I make this a web service? Any further ideas or suggestions are more than welcome.

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You would be better off moving to 4.0 and using the TPL. That way you could create a Task<> to run each simulation and have the TPL scheduler schedule them appropriately as resources become available. As the runs finish you could put the results into a ConcurrentCollection<> and once everything had finished run a collation on them (you could even have another Task collating while the others were running if this turned out to be important to you.

In 3.5 much of the scheduling work would be left to you and the APIs aren't as clean for creating tasks. You'd also not have any of the concurrent collections which might make result collation a lot simpler (never underextimate the complexity of writing a concurrent collection thats both correct and performant).

If you make this a web service then you have to understand the usage of the service and how that will effect the web service. Essentially you can improve individual request latency but this may come at the cost of a degredation in overall throughput. See the following link for a discussion of this.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/pfxteam/archive/2010/02/08/9960003.aspx