[fpc-devel] Parallel Computing

[Mattias Gaertner]

On Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:24:59 +0100 (CET)
Daniël Mantione <daniel.mantione at freepascal.org> wrote:

> 
> 
> 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.

True.
Maybe it would be good to first start the OpenMP library part - a unit
providing some functions to easily use light weight threads.


Mattias