[fpc-devel] Parallel Computing

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Tue, 11 Dec 2007, schreef Mark Morgan Lloyd:

> Florian Klaempfl wrote:
> 
> > > It is common in the scientistware I benchmark daily. The evil
> > > geniuses parallelize their applications by placing a some OpenMP
> > > hints in their source code.
> > 
> > Yes, but only some loops. But just imagine how OpenMP could help in
> > parallelization of the compiler? It can't imo.
> 
> But in fairness a compiler is neither more nor less specialist than heavy
> numbercrunching code. OpenMP parallel procedures should, as one particular
> simple example, be able to improve Mandelbrot speed significantly since there
> is minimal interaction between the areas being calculated.
> 
> There's lots more people running big finite difference or TLM models than are
> doing systems programming. Getting them interested in a language that is more
> friendly than C or FORTRAN would be to everybody's advantage.
> 
> I've got some cellular automaton stuff that I want to look at, and while
> explicit threads are probably the way to go having implicit parallelisation
> would be a very interesting alternative.

Manual threading is not very comfortable, that is not the point. The point 
is, if we were to spend a lot of time on a parallelization feature, we 
want to spend it well.

OpenMP is just one way and has its limitations.

Daniël