[Haskell-cafe] interaction between ghci and cudaBLAS library

[Don Stewart]

seb:
> 
> In my efforts to integrate this library into Haskell (I am working on OS X
> 10.5.6 with ghc-6.10.1 and CUDA 2.0) I am getting a bad interaction between
> the threads in ghci - when I call the library init function via the FFI,
> ghci will block in __semwait_signal. Of course if I build an executable
> which I guess has only one thread then all is well.
> 
> AFAIK the CUDA library is re-entrant (or threadsafe) in that it will
> initialize a device context for each thread that calls it. I guess that
> might be part of the problem. Certainly there is a call to
> _pthread_getspecific in that library.
> 
> This is show stopper for me as I want to use GHCI to call blas routines on
> the device (this lends itself very nicely to a monadic approach - leaving
> the matrices on the device until we are done applying sequential
> computations - and only then bringing them back into the "real" world).
> 
> Since there is this association between the device context and the calling
> thread - is there a way to get a handle on the threading in ghci? (or just
> have a single thread)  
> 
> But why are we blocking? I would have expected completion or is ghci smart
> enough to prevent any non-deterministic behaviour that the current setup
> would entail?
> 
> Any ideas or suggestions of how to proceed with this?  
> The final work should it be successful will be offered to the community as a
> basis for doing high performance linear algebra on CUDA devices as well as
> get my haskell up to speed as a side effect :) 
> 

Do you get the same problem in compiled code? (GHCi is generally for
exploratory work only).

E.g.

    ghc -O2 --make ....
or
    ghc -O2 --make -threaded ....

-- Don