Difference between revisions of "Taking advantage of multi core/multi threading machines"
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== Introduction == | == Introduction == | ||
During the past years, the focus of the development of FPC was on making FPC multi platform. This goal has been successfully reached, FPC is available on all important platforms so we need new challenges. | During the past years, the focus of the development of FPC was on making FPC multi platform. This goal has been successfully reached, FPC is available on all important platforms so we need new challenges. | ||
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Further, e.g. for the build system, information how long a building a certain package is estimated to take might be interesting as well because this would allow a better planning how dependend packages should be build. (Marcov: good point. detailed Profiling info of the compilation process, with better granularity than the overall runtime would certainly help :-) | Further, e.g. for the build system, information how long a building a certain package is estimated to take might be interesting as well because this would allow a better planning how dependend packages should be build. (Marcov: good point. detailed Profiling info of the compilation process, with better granularity than the overall runtime would certainly help :-) | ||
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Revision as of 23:18, 5 February 2006
Please discuss at the discussion page.
Introduction
During the past years, the focus of the development of FPC was on making FPC multi platform. This goal has been successfully reached, FPC is available on all important platforms so we need new challenges.
If one looks at the roadmaps of AMD and Intel, you'll see that future processors won't get have performance gains by higher clockrates as it was the last decades. Instead, the CPUs will be multi core. However, multi core processors require new apporaches to take advantage of these cores. So I consider this as one of the main task for the next years: making FPC ready for multi core systems.
This must done on several levels:
- language
- libaries
- compiler
- build system
Making the language multi core ready
This requires a lot of dicussion I fear: which new language elements can be added to make building multi threaded applications easier.
e.g.
- monitor classes ?
Libraries
This task is almost finished, most libraries are multi threading ready. Some things like the heap manager need tuning but that's it.
Multi threading in the compiler
This is a long term task, making the compiler multithreaded, i.e. start different threads to compile several units at once.
Build system
This should be rather easy with proper package dependencies: the building of different packages being independed can be done simultaneously. (who determines this? Does this mean the compiler should know about packages and their dependancies? Package groups?)
All this requires also a common resource management, i.e. how much threads/processes should be spawned to take an optimum advantage of the multiple cores. It makes no sense to start the building of 10 packages at once on a dual core system. This causes only cache thrashing etc and slows down things. (Marco: 2 cpu's : 3-4 threads 4 CPU's : 6-8 threads)
Further, e.g. for the build system, information how long a building a certain package is estimated to take might be interesting as well because this would allow a better planning how dependend packages should be build. (Marcov: good point. detailed Profiling info of the compilation process, with better granularity than the overall runtime would certainly help :-)
