Re: Multithreaded scientific programming

[Martin Krischik <krischik@users.sourceforge.net>]

Bj�rn Persson schrieb:
> Martin Krischik wrote:
>> David B. Chorlian wrote:
>>> Talk about cache, TLB, and other memory management topics which
>>> are the serious problems in large-scale scientific computing.
>>
>> Well, for that I would have to know what a TLB is...
> 
> Translation lookaside buffer � a small cache memory for the page table, 
> which the memory management unit uses to speed up the translation from 
> virtual addresses to hardware addresses. I guess David wants to write 
> programs such that they only relatively rarely need to access memory 
> pages that aren't in the TLB.

Well, in that case I would say that's exactly what the -mtune compiler 
option is for.

So David, to answer to your question about the TLB: This has has nothing 
to do with the programming language front end (Ada, Fortran, C, etc. 
pp.) - it's handled by the compiler back end (Pentium, Athlon, PowerPC, 
etc. pp).

Perhaps you have only worked with compilers which only feature one front 
and one back end - but this is not always the case. In fact, most Ada 
compiler feature multiple back ends.

Martin