Re: "A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software"

From: Jp Calderone (exarkun_at_divmod.com)
Date: 01/08/05 

To: python-list@python.org
Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2005 15:44:53 GMT

On Sat, 08 Jan 2005 14:22:30 GMT, Lee Harr <lee@example.com> wrote:
>>> [http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm]. It argues that the
> >> continous CPU performance gain we've seen is finally over. And that future
> >> gain would primary be in the area of software concurrency taking advantage
> >> hyperthreading and multicore architectures.
> >>
>
> > Well, yes. However, it's not as bad as it looks. I've spent a good part
> > of my professional life with multiprocessors (IBM mainframes) and
> > I have yet to write a multi-thread program for performance reasons.
> > All of those systems ran multiple programs, not single programs
> > that had to take advantage of the multiprocessor environment.
> > Your typical desktop is no different. My current system has 42
> > processes running, and I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority
> > of them aren't multi-threaded.
> >
>
> Exactly. If every one of your processes had its own 2 Ghz processor
> running nothing else, I think you would be pretty happy. Your OS
> had better be well-written to deal with concurrent access to
> memory and disks, but I think for general application development
> there will be huge speed boosts with little need for new
> programming paradigms.

  Not likely. How often do you run 4 processes that are all
bottlenecked on CPU? It's not a common usage pattern. If you
have 16 CPUs, and 15 of them are running mostly idle processes
and that *one* process you'd wish would hurry the heck up and
finish has the 16th pegged at 100% usage, you are not a happy
camper.

  For the case where you do have a lot of competing unrelated
processes, no doubt SMP is a big win automatically, but there
will still need to be language innovations to make it easier
to develop software which can benefit from the additional
hardware for the more common case of individual CPU hungry
processes.

  Jp

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