[Haskell-cafe] Threading and Mullticore Computation

[Dušan Kolář]

Hello,

  IMO, the conclusion about instant cache misses due to several threads 
sharing memory and/or performing large memory consumption is very highly 
probable, especially on Intel CPUs with shared L2 cache.

  I have several examples, where threading means significant time 
consumption increase (<new time> = <number of threads> * <old time>). My 
personal conclusion - use linear recursive functions only (so that they 
could be optimized), Int instead of Integer, if possible, no data 
structure traversal (unless such a structure is very small, L2 caches 
are several MBs only). Such a way cache misses are minimized for 
both/all threads. Moreover, OS needs some time instantly (=> cache 
refill/misses), thus, I've devoted one core for OS, others for 
computation (quad core), which brings certain improvement and more 
accurate measurements.

  Regards

    Dusan

Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> Hello Andrew,
>
> Tuesday, March 3, 2009, 9:21:42 PM, you wrote:
>
>   
>> I just tried it with GHC 6.10.1. Two capabilities is still slower. (See
>> attachments. Compiled with -O2 -threaded.)
>>     
>
> i don't think so:
>
>   Total time    4.88s  (  5.14s elapsed)
>
>   Total time    7.08s  (  4.69s elapsed)
>
> so with 1 thread wall clock time is 5 seconds, with 2 thread wall time
> is 4.7 seconds
>
> cpu time spent increased with 2 threads - this indicates that you
> either use hyperthreaded/SMT-capable cpu or speed is limited by memory
> access operations
>
> so, my conclusion - this benchmark limited by memory latencies so it
> cannot be efficiently multithreaded
>
>
>