[Lazarus] Threads in Lazarus code base

[Dariusz Mazur]

  W dniu 2010-09-17 17:49, Mattias Gaertner pisze:
> On Fri, 17 Sep 2010 14:09:59 +0200
> Dariusz Mazur<darekm at emadar.com>  wrote:
>
>> [...]
>> Whats about CILK http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cilk
>>
>>
>> |_function_  fib (n: integer):integer;
>> var
>>     x,y : integer;
>> begin
>>
>>        if (n<   2)  then exit(n)
>>        else begin
>>
>>           x :=_spawn_  fib (n-1);
>>           y := fib (n-2);
>>           _sync_;
>>           exit(x+y);
>>       end;
>> end;
>> |
> Have you noticed that most examples for multi threading are either
> - easy to understand, but completely impractical (the above is an
>    order of magnitude slower than single threaded)
I don;t agee. First with CILK approach we deal with task, not threads. 
Thus we need good task passing to workers.
But seems, that this approach will be faster because on each SPAWN 
invoke we add only task (and this is very simple and short function, as 
add to FIFO queue)
And each worker (worker count is similar to cores) find task to do. Even 
when task are very different (shorter and longer) gueue pass task to 
worker with balancing .   Why You think  this will be magnitude slower I 
don't know.

> - OR practical, but hard to understand
> ?
>
> Note: afaik CILK is the same as parallel loops:
No. On loop we divide iterations on start loops. When each iteration has 
different  time of computing, we lost concurrence, because one thread 
finish, but rest  work.  Second: we not initialize thread on SPAWN (with 
loops threads are initializing on start loop), Workers wait  for task on 
idle. Push and pop task from queue can be very fast. Of course this 
depend on implementation (for example each worker should deal with own 
queue, but should be possibility to draw task form other queue, this 
approach is faster than single MPMC FIFO queue)

> It allows to make some
> special cases need less typing, can increase readability and can
> decrease overhead. As always with multithreading: wrongly used it can
> make code run much slower.

Multithreading is not only for faster computing.




-- 
   Darek