Thread-safety of read-only memory access

Question

I\'ve implemented the Barnes-Hut gravity algorithm in C as follows:

1. Build a tree of clustered stars.
2. For each star, traverse the tree and apply the gr

Answer 1

If your data is read-only, then no, you do not need to make a private copy of the tree for each thread. This is the biggest advantage that a shared memory threading model offers!

I'm not aware of any performance problems with such a model. If anything, it should be faster depending on if your CPUs can share some of their cache.