[fpc-devel] Parallel Computing

[Boian Mitov]

Very nice wrap on this one Michael.
While architectures such as OpenMP or CUDA do not solve and don't even try 
to solve the general case of MT development, they are very powerful in the 
areas of image processing and DSP. Indeed we are already researching CUDA 
for usage in our libraries. For those unaware of it, CUDA is the MT API for 
the NVidia GPUs . My NVIdia comes with 240 cores, and can perform with mind 
blowing speed fairly complex DSP.
Each tool simply has its place and usage ;-) , so does OpenMP . That does 
not mean that it is the magic wand for solving MT, it is just another tool 
that we can use.

With best regards,
  Boian Mitov

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Mitov Software
www.mitov.com
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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Schnell" <mschnell at lumino.de>
To: "FPC developers' list" <fpc-devel at lists.freepascal.org>
Sent: Monday, November 03, 2008 11:42 PM
Subject: Re: [fpc-devel] Parallel Computing


>
>> Can you show a real-world program with source that significantly benefits 
>> by using OpenMP (alone)?
>>
> A task that should benefit from multiple threads on an SMP system should 
> be Matrix multiplication another is doing DSP-like things and FFT. Those 
> are really common tasks when handling physical and mathematical 
> calculations. All these feature independent outer loops that can be done 
> as independent threads that only need synchronization when all are ready. 
> Thus in GNU C a simple line "#pragma opm_parallel for" would be enough to 
> run them in parallel via OpenMP.
>
> It would be nice to compare the speed of such a program on a modern four 
> core PC with and without this line. (Should be easy, but I don't have such 
> a machine myself:( and I didn't ever do C for PC programs yet :) :) , but 
> I'll see if I can find something somewhere....)
>
> -Michael
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