[fpc-devel] Parallel Computing

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:

> A quick Google search confirms our thoughts. SMP was indeed in OS/2 2.11.

OK, I'll gladly concede the point about SMP on OS/2, but the fact remains that 
SMP didn't really take off on PCs until around 2000.

I think the point stands however about poor language support for the concept 
in the fairly early days. However from the point of view of FPC I think we've 
got to work out whether there's scope for improvement of threads etc. (e.g. 
adding processor affinity support to the basic TThread class) or if something 
could be done to tell the compiler to spread a computation across multiple 
processors.

On a positive note, courtesy of a number of eBay transactions I've now got a 
reasonably big SPARC system specifically to look at this sort of thing and I 
can confirm that the tmt1 test- previously a problem on SPARC- runs and is 
distributed over all available processors.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]