Multy-core CPUs

Herbert König herbertkoenig at gmx.net
Thu Oct 25 14:31:59 UTC 2007


Hello Peter,


PWL> It's all good. I'd not heard of The Rat before. Sounds like an 
                                     ^^^^^^^ nice Typo :-)))
                                     
PWL> What are your thoughts on the whole concurrency issues being debated?

my practical knowledge in this comes from hardware interrupts (mainly
digital signal processing) with hard realtime demands. (If you loose
an audio sample every one will hear it. The live performing musician
will hear a 5ms processing delay, even worse if it's not constant)

This is a very special case. I decided against memory locking to avoid
complexity. I use a kind of semaphore for synching but simpler.

The number of processes (5) is manually manageable but barely. Hard
realtime constraints are out of the scope of Win/Mac/Linux OS.

Otherwise I clearly lean towards Jason's proposal of

self breakupStructureWith: 10000 ... and no fine grained locking.

But that's because the problem areas I'm concerned with all fall into
categories which benefit from this proposal and won't die of excessive
copying. But that's no valid argument in the discussion :-) But I
tucked away Jason's mail in case I start parallelizing apps.

So I follow the discussion very interested and close and I hope to
never have to solve the kind of problems you use as examples :-).

If I have to, First thing I'll read your suggested book on semaphores.
Maybe earlier for fun.

BTW I'm an engineer not a cs person.


Cheers

Herbert                            mailto:herbertkoenig at gmx.net




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