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Running 100,000 Parallel Threads

An anonymous reader writes "This story explains how the latest Linux development kernel is now able to start and stop over 100,000 threads in parallel in only 2 seconds (about 14 minutes 58 seconds faster than with earlier Linux kernels)! Much of this impressive work is thanks to Ingo Molnar, author of the O(1) scheduler recently merged with the 2.5 Linux development kernel."

12 of 387 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I'm only a humble C programmer, but.... by cdrobbins · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    My above comment was moderated as a troll, and yeah, maybe it sounded like that. But it's a serious question. I'd like to know what benefits us normal uses will see.

  2. Re:I'm only a humble C programmer, but.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    And this is a perfect example of moderation abuse on slashdot. I swear to all things holy, give a geek just a little power and it goes straight to their head! You stupid fucking mods! The guys post was not a troll, it was an honest question seeking an honest answer. Someone with half a brain mod the guy up. He is new here, asked a simple question and one of your power mad mods have modded him down for it and labeled him a troll. What a great start to slashdot he has recieved. This place is so full of abuse between those who post just to flame people, mods who go overboard and think they are special in some way or more worthy of choosing what is seen, and the zealot hordes that when someone new here posts a valid question maybe you should give them a chance. This is ridiculous...

    For cdrobbins: you are new here and thus probably not compulsive in your viewing of slashdot. I recommend leaving before you are addicted. You have now seen first hand how unfair the mod system is and suffered from the abuse of an idiot with mod points. I would not blame you for never coming back here. Maybe some day, there will be no mod system, we can only hope.

  3. Re:I'm only a humble C programmer, but.... by Jester99 · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    And why wouldn't you want a mod system?

    If you want to view what everybody posts, just set your default viewing threshold to -1. Simple as that. I found that scanning at +4 typically lets me get a good sense of things if I'm short on time. If I've got more time to spend, then I view at a lower threshold, like +2. If there's an interesting looking thread, then I'll view that whole thread.

    However, I simply don't have the time to cut through all the noise to the signals on my own. Without the moderation system, I would just not be able to read comments manageably, at all. And that's just the truth.

    The mod system does do a decent job of reducing the S:N ratio, on balance.

  4. Re:I'm only a humble C programmer, but.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    You know, if you were to come off of your +4 high horse and delve in the trenches of 0 for a while you would possibly see that you are wrong. The very post that you replied to will never make it to +4, just as your reply probably will not either. Yet here we are, having a discusssion that must be somewhat relative to both of us. I, the anonymous coward and you the logged in user. Moderation abuse is out of control and has been for a long time. The post from cdrobbins just highlighted it and I, who does browse at -1 or 0 am simply tired of seeing posts abused by mods whose only redeeming quality seems to be positive karma and the length of time they have been here. Think about it, these are the very people who karma whore to get there posts moderated, then one day become mods themselves. The system is corrupt, and broken. It only rewards group think! In short, stay around long enough and post with karma in mind and you will one day be eligible for mod status also. Yet the one true way to get is to post the same type of groupthink drivel the hordes feed on. The karma system is nothing more than a vicous cycle, a breeding ground for mods who will continue to reinforce the groupthink status quo of slashdot. How about a system that scores posts based on the amount of replies they recieve? Novel idea huh? It seems like posts relevant to the conversation at hand would garner the most replies, and more than likey accurately reflect what the hordes wish to discuss. The whole thing could be automated easily, the only problem being people who reply to their own posts to boost the score. I am sure the brain trust of /. can figure out a way around that, and no junior taco groupthink mod enforcers would be required.Ack.

  5. Group think by Subcarrier · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    In any large group of people you will find a few idiots, a few luminaries, and a great number of average thinkers. Sometimes the only thing that separates idiots from luminaries is their lack of social grace. Welcome to democracy.

    --
    "I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
  6. Re:100000?! by WaKall · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Mod parent up :) I never had mod points when I need them.

  7. Re:How *I* got kicked out of the computer lab by kasperd · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    I ran this in DOS: prompt "Enter Password:"

    I remember in highschool on most of our DOS based computers some joker had changed the prompt. Not as sophisticated as yours though, he had just replaced the prompt with a lot of nasty words. Since I didn't find that funny, and I actually would like to use the computers, I did a minor trick to the setup. At the end of AUTOEXEC.BAT I would call another .BAT file instead of the menu. The other .BAT file did three things:
    1. Set the prompt the way I liked it.
    2. Load a 16byte TSR program to disable the beeps.
    3. Run the menu as usual.
    The joker never found out where I had put the new prompt. Of course I was a little worried that some teacher would find out I had messed with the configuration. Even more worried I got when a teacher one day asked if I was the one who had installed the TSR program. Turned out he just wanted to ask for permission to use it on his own computer as well. *Phew*.
    --

    Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
  8. Re:How *I* got kicked out of the computer lab by Monkelectric · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    my god thats the best thing Ive ever heard! mod this guy up! :) (and) Lemme tell a couple stories :)

    Back in junior high I had this little TSR program that would make letters (in text mode) drop off the screen, they would fall until they landed on another letter, if not, they would drop right off the screen ... this was back in the day where you had a dual floppy system (one disk for the OS, one for your applications). We jurry rigged as many OS disks as we could to load 4 copies of the program when it booted ... Long story short, as students started to complain letters were falling off the screem, the teacher flipped and couldnt figure out WTF was going on :D you could see the panic in is weasel face. This was right around the time of the Michaelanglo virus, so eventually my buddy and I suggested it was a virus and that we would take the disks home and disinfect them ... we undid our dirty work and laughed about it for the rest of the year :)

    My favorite story though, my highschool had *1* computer in the library, it was a dog slow 286, and it ran some mico-fiche searching software, and some cd-rom based article. It had this crap-ass DOS menu program that supposedly locked you out of the OS. One day it segfaulted and gave the location of the program (**EXCEPTION IN C:\MENU\WHATEVER.EXE). Ahhhh a dos prompt! But what could I do ? ... nothin really except run deltree, and thats kind of cruel. So I thought for awhile, and well I knew the location of the EXE ... so I whipped up a little boot disk that zipped up a copy of the menu directory and then rebooted ... I walked up to the computer, put the disc in, toggled the power, and walla a copy of the menu program :) I had hoped I could glean the password from the datafiles, but no such luck. so I started to think, what COULD I do ... well long story short, there was this program called goldwave (I think), that would attach a MOD+player to an exe (for suck-ass demo makers), and execute them in paralell. Clearly with a copy of the EXE and goldwave, evil was the only viable option. I picked this GOD AWFULL mod file of some screetching followed by more screetching and drums [those who were around in the day must remember how truely awfull mods could be] :) I attached the mod+player to the exe and modified the batch file that executed the menu program to copy a fresh copy of my singing menu each time the menu program was started, but only after the SECOND time the menu was run (this was real important). I made another bootdisk that renamed the old exe and copied in my new batchfiles/mods.

    So I went to the machine, put my disk in, toggled the power again, and it installed my modified menu exe. Well remember I said it started singing the SECOND time the menu was run? That was so I could be nowhere near the machine when it started singing. Sure enough, the next morning when the machine was turned on for the day, it starter caterwalling out its PC speaker. I wasn't there, but I was told it was quite a spectacle and that the librarians flipped out completley :) They never could proved who did it, but it was pretty obvious I was the one.

    Ok, story time is over, continue your trolling :)

    --

    Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley

  9. Re:How *I* got kicked out of the computer lab by bunratty · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    I got started with computers in the early 80's on a PDP-11. Once I found a program that converted files from uppercase letters to lowercase letters. The interesting thing is that it had the supervisor bit set so that the program would have supervisor privileges while runnnig. I could destroy most compiled software by "lowercasing" the "uppercase" data in them. Lucky for them I didn't know which files were part of the OS!

    Then there was the time I told someone the admin's password was "zapper". I watched the keys he typed as he entered his password!

    --
    What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
  10. Moderate down what you don't understand by magellan · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    That's what's happening here. It is much like ignoring somebody asking a question you do not know the answer to.

    Today's development environments do not do a great job of autmatically parallelizing code, and there are very few outstanding multithreading programmers in this world. Thank goodness one of them is working on this for Linux. The improvement in threading support is critical for Linux to scale in shared memory, multi-processor environments (SMP, NUMA), but will only be important for certain applications. The typical Slashdot reader uses a dual processor Linux system at best, where excellent multithreading is not necessary.

  11. Thats why there needs to be more moderators... by hackwrench · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    so that the moderation can't be swayed by bad moderation. As it is, any given post gets affected by at most about 10 moderators.

  12. Java is great in Linux, but when by SHEENmaster · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    will Mac OS Java shape up!?

    Not only is there no version of J2DK1.4 for PPC(in Mac OS X or Debian/PPC), but the Mac OS X version takes a long time to load.

    I reboot to Linux and run Forte over X(11R6) using my server's processor and ram(768mb as opposed to 128mb). I'd use OS X if I could get an X(11R6) server to work, but neither XDarwin nor Fink will last more than a minute before crashing.

    Can this new technology be integrated into OS X or is it part of a static library that the JDK must be built with? Sun is infamous for building against outdated dynamic library, I had to 'ln -s' a library manually when installing the JDK.

    --
    You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.