Multi-Threaded Programming Without the Pain

holden karau writes "Gigahertz are out and cores are in. Programmers must begin to develop applications that take full advantage of the increasing number of cores present in modern computers. However, multi-threaded development has been notoriously hard to do. Researcher Stefanus Du Toit discusses and demonstrates RapidMind, a software system he co-authored, that takes the pain out of multi-threaded programming in C++. For his demo he created a program on the PlayStation 3 representing thousands of chickens, each independently tracked by a single processing core. The talk itself is interesting but the demo is golden."

Comments

Don't Bother

[tonywestonuk]

99.99% of the time, multi-thredded programming is not needed, and can actually *Slow* things down as mutexes block each other, killing performance - It takes a certain amount of time to establish a mutex, so two threads working on a single bit of memory can perform like a dog as each try to block, and unblock the other.. Also, Multi-core CPU's, have made using windows bareable when under load, because current singly threadded processes leave one spare core available for the OS to use when any app decides to eat all the cpu!

Yeh, if you have a processor intensive routine, eg Photoshop filter, then selectivly use multithreaded code to enhance the performance of the critical loop, but other than this, I see little point, and will probably trip you up later on.

Re:Don't Bother

[Anonymous Coward]

I love to read slashdot for the highly informative posts from the top thinkers of our time :D

You dont really know what you are talking about right ?

Re:Toy Supercomputer

[Doc Ruby]

Fuck you. Stop fantasizing about me jerking off.

You don't win any arguments with "open your eyes" and nothing backing it up. What part of 204GFLOPS don't you understand? What part of the serial nature of IO, whether over SATA, USB, or ethernet don't you understand? What is it about addition of multiple channels for a total don't you understand?

When modern GPUs are as programmable as in the Cell in the PS3, as demonstrated most recently by the work in the story we're now discussing, then yes, they're supercomputers.

I know your disorder. You're a STUPID ASSHOLE.

Did I mention FUCK YOU? FUCK YOU.