I wanted to start a discussion based on current state of FPC and High Performance Computing (HPC).
The premise of the thread is to discuss high scale threads. Currently FPC has matured to the point where it might be beneficial to start targeting a particular market for users. The first thing that comes to mind is the university community where coding is second to theory. Pascal offers ease of code readability and in turn brings the ability to easily organize scientific formulas into computer code that when arranged properly can be executed in a high scale environment, delivering faster, near instant or instant results. After reading a few responses in a separate discussion regarding threading I came to realize that some work remains to FPC with regard to High Performance Threading. FPC is advanced in that it offers native cross platform access to kernel threads. FPC however, on Linux, relies on a libc Posix Threads (pthreads) library that is a widely adopted implement of the POSIX specification. Microsoft has spent a lot of resources on parallel computing and it may be beneficial for the FPC project to at least begin to explore the possibility of FPC to be used in a professional high performance environment. IMO - it may be smarter to develop of a new threading paradigm. A HPC threading system that addresses issues with waitfor/suspend/resume and resolve them for *nix/windows/mac but do so knowing that there are most likely tens of thousands of threads running. I would like to offer my commitment to this issue since FPC is ideal for real-time computational engines. With regard to HPC, the native TThread object has been implemented (under *nix) with redundant barriers in creation, suspend, and resume features. This redundancy makes for slow thread creation times and as such is not ideal as is. Re-writing the current TThread implement may not prove nearly impossible as is, because under windows Resume/Suspend Thread is merely an API kernel call and *nix has no such API. Even if we were to re-write the TThreads unit to remove dependency on the pThreads library, we would still be stuck with creating a semaphore under linux, one per thread instance to gain Suspend/Resume functionality. Suggested Reading: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/glibc/glibc-linuxthreads-2.3.6.tar.gz http://openmp.org/wp/openmp-specifications/ http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/concurrency/default.aspx Anyone interested in consulting or helping? _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
