Re: Threadpool with priority version 1.1 ...

[Warren <ve3wwg@gmail.com>]

Georg Bauhaus expounded in news:4baa27f2$0$6770$9b4e6d93
@newsspool3.arcor-online.net:

> Dmitry A. Kazakov schrieb:
>>  how the proposed algorithms map onto the
>> Ada tasking model, especially taking into account that Ada tasking
>> primitives are higher level, than ones known in other languages.
> 
> As a side note: it seems anything but easy to explain
> the idea of a concurrent language, not a library, and
> not CAS things either, as the means to support the programmer
> who wishes to express concurrency.
> Concurrency is not seen as one of the modes of expression
> in language X. Rather, concurrency is seen as an effect
> of interweaving concurrency primitives and some algorithm.
> 
> What can one do about this?

I thought the Cilk project was rather interesting in
their attempt to make C (and C++) more parallel
to take advantage of multi-core cpus. But the language 
still requires that the programmer program the parallel 
aspects of the code with some simple language enhancements.

As cores eventually move to 128+-way cores, this needs
to change to take full advantage of shortened elapsed
times, obviously.  I think this might require a radical
new high-level language to do it.  

Another barrier I see to this is the high cost of 
starting a new thread and stack space allocation.

I was disappointed to learn that the Cilk compiler uses
multiple stacks in the same way that any pthread 
implementation would. If a single threaded version of
the program needs S bytes of stack, a P-cpu threaded
version would require P * S bytes of stack.  They do get
tricky with stack frames when they perform "work stealing"
on a different cpu. But that is as close as they get
to a cactus stack.

Somehow you gotta make thread startup and shutdown
cheaper. The only other thing to do is to create a
pool of re-usable threads. But in my mind, the
optimizing compiler is probably in the best place
to make parallel code optimizations that consist of
short runs of code.

Warren