[Haskell-cafe] Threading and Mullticore Computation

[mwinter at brocku.ca]

Hi,

I tried a get into concurrent Haskell using multiple cores. The program below
creates 2 task in different threads, executes them, synchronizes the threads
using MVar () and calculates the time needed.  

import System.CPUTime
import Control.Concurrent
import Control.Concurrent.MVar

myTask1 = do
            return $! fac 60000
            print "Task1 done!"
	  where fac 0 = 1
	        fac n = n * fac (n-1)
	      
myTask2 = do
            return $! fac' 60000 1 1
            print "Task2 done!"
	  where fac' n m p = if  m>n then p else fac'  n (m+1) (m*p)

main = do
	 mvar <- newEmptyMVar
	 pico1 <- getCPUTime
	 forkIO (myTask1 >> putMVar mvar ())
	 myTask2
	 takeMVar mvar
	 pico2 <- getCPUTime
	 print (pico2 - pico1)
	 

I compiled the code using 
$ ghc FirstFork.hs -threaded
and executed it by
$ main +RTS -N1   resp.   $ main +RTS -N2
I use GHC 6.8.3 on Vista with an Intel Dual Core processor. Instead of getting
a speed up when using 2 cores I get as significant slow down, even though there 
is no sharing in my code above (at least none I am aware of. BTW, that was reason 
that I use 2 different local factorial functions). On my computer the 1-core version 
takes about 8.3sec and the 2-core version 12.8sec. When I increase the numbers 
from 60000 to 100000 the time difference gets even worse (30sec vs 51 sec). Can 
anybody give me an idea what I am doing wrong?

Thanks,
Michael



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