[fpc-devel] Parallel Computing

[Michael Schnell]

> I don't see how Mandelbrot requires OpenMP. One can easily launch n
> threads depending on the number of the available cores.
>   
(We are discussing this in the German Lazarus Forum right now...)

I feel that OpenMP is never _required_ to optimize a problem, but just 
adds a high level of programming convenience to a language.

In fact the "Mandelbrot" test is not even done with threads (or OpenMP) 
in GNU-C. Someone else in the German Lazarus Forum said he found 
threading in some tests done in C and on none done in Pascal, leading to 
an unfair result on multicore machines.

But doing _explicit_ threads in FPC would not be allowed according to 
the rules in ALIOTH: they only allow simple programming and not complex 
tricks so that the source code for a test case is similar with among all 
languages. I suppose adding a "#pragma omp_parallel for" line in the C 
source or a "parallel" keyword in a for statement in FPC or Oxygen would 
be nice, while explicitly creating multiple threads would be denied.

-Michael