Re: question about tasks, multithreading and multi-cpu machines

[tmoran@acm.org]

There's rather a big difference between statement level granularity
(like the Occam examples) and module level (like Ada tasks).  It's
merely confusing to mix them together.

>The interesting problem is writing portable code that takes advantage of N
>processors (N = 1, 2, 3, ...), with N unknown until run time.
   A multitasking quicksort on my hyperthreaded machine runs faster than
the single tasking version IF the "extra" CPU isn't already busy doing
something else and IF the data set to sort isn't so big that breaking it
up results in cache thrashing.  Writing such code portably is indeed an
"interesting problem".