[SOLVED] Ecse 4320/6320  course project #1: programming with multiple threads

1. Introduction
The objective of this project is to implement a C/C++ module that uses multiple threads to compress an input data
stream. It aims to help you gain hands-on experience of multithread programming, which could very much help
your job hunting. Compression can be done by calling the ZSTD library (https://facebook.github.io/zstd/), which
was open sourced by Facebook and has been widely adopted in the industry. Each 16KB block in the input data
stream should be compressed by ZSTD individually (i.e., all the 16KB blocks are compressed independently from
each other). All the compressed blocks are in-order written to one output file (i.e., the 1st 16KB in the input stream
is compressed and written to the output file as the 1st block, the 2nd 16KB in the input stream is compressed and
written to the file right after the 1st block, etc.). You can use a big compressible file (e.g., tens of GBs) as the source
of the input data stream. Your code should use one thread to read data from the file, dispatch 16KB blocks to other
worker threads for compression, receive compressed blocks from other worker threads, and write compressed
blocks (in the correct order) to the output file.
2. Requirement
Your implementation should be able to support a configurable number of worker threads. In addition to the source
code, your Github site should contain
(1) Readme that clearly explains the structure/usage of your code
(2) Experimental results that show the performance of your multi-threaded compression module under
different number of worker threads
(3) Analysis and conclusion
3. Additional Information
C/C++ does not have built-in support for multithreaded application, hence must rely on the underlying operating
systems. Linux provides the pthread library to support multithreaded programming. You can find a very nice tutorial
on pthread at https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/pthreads/. Microsoft also provides support for multi-thread
programming (e.g., see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/procthread/multiple-threads). You are
highly encouraged to program on Linux since Linux-based programming experience will help you most on the job
market.