[fpc-pascal] Threading vs Parallelism ?

[Tony Whyman]

The problem I have with this thread (no pun intended) is that it is not 
comparing like with like. As demonstrated by many of the replies, 
Parallelism and Threads are not the same thing.

I would offer the following definitions:

- Parallelism is a (design) concept for expressing collateral actions in 
which the processing order of the actions is unspecified. They may take 
place serially or contemporaneously in real time, or a mixture of the two.

- Threads are an implementation mechanism for realising collateral 
actions within a single processing environment.

Neither of the above implies multiple CPUs or processing units.


On 31/03/17 07:43, Ryan Joseph wrote:
>> On Mar 30, 2017, at 3:06 PM, Michael Schnell <mschnell at lumino.de> wrote:
>>
>>> Huh, ok, but why parallelism is better and how to do it with fpc ?
>>>
>> Parallelism within a process always is based on threads.
>>
>> AFAIK, fpc does not (yet) provide a more convenient abstraction for parallelism (such as parallel loops) than TThread.
>>
>> -Michael
> It’s my understanding that for parallelism to make sense you need to have at least more than 1 separate compute unit, be that a CPU core or a GPU.
>
> If you had a GPU with 250 compute units or a CPU with 250 cores you would need to design your task in a way so that it could be broken down into as many discrete portions as possible so that you could take advantage of the multiple cores running in parallel. Even if you didn’t have a single thread and the execution blocked until finished you wouldn’t see any performance increases unless you designed your program to scale for parallelism. Running 250 threads on a single core isn’t going to be 250x faster but running 250 threads on 250 cores may be.
>
>
> Regards,
> 	Ryan Joseph
>
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