[fpc-devel] Parallel Computing

[Florian Klaempfl]

Daniël Mantione schrieb:
> 
> Op Tue, 11 Dec 2007, schreef Florian Klaempfl:
> 
>> Mattias Gärtner schrieb:
>>> Zitat von Michael Schnell <mschnell at lumino.de>:
>>>
>>>>> Think about the alternative: It is much harder to implement the same
>>>>> parallel loop with TThread. So OpenMP makes parallel loops much easier
>>>>> to implement. For me this is the 'Delphi' way: Makes things easy and
>>>>> readable.
>>>>>
>>>> Of course you are right. In the example of "parallel" loops It's _a_lot_
>>>> easier to to use for the programmer. "Lightweight-threaded" stuff like
>>>> parallel loops was not the original aim of ThreadEvents. The original
>>>> target was a more "standard" use of threads. But it _can_ be used for
>>>> parallel loops, too, and it follows the "Delphi-language-paradigms" a
>>>> lot tighter than using TThread.
>>>>
>>>> I don't suppose that anybody will start implementing real parallel loops
>>>> like suggested on the wiki page any time soon.
>>> The examples are very artificial to demonstrate the problems.
>>> Some real world examples / tutorials should be added on a new page. Parallel
>>> algorithms are seldom taught in books/schools/university, so programmers are
>>> not used to them. This is slowly improving.
>> For me the whole OpenMP approach is really artifical, I don't see a real
>> use in real world code for it honestly.
> 
> 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.

> 
> However, MPI is de facto the standard for parallelization and this is most 
> used. There are people who believe OpenMP is more efficient than MPI 
> (directly reading from another threads its data is more efficient than 
> sending messages between processes). However, modern MPI implementations 
> use shared memory and RDMA between processes to counter this; I have 
> seen little practical evidence that OpenMP is faster than MPI.
> 
> Daniël
> 
> 
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