Re: [Caml-list] OC4MC : OCaml for Multicore architectures

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

On Thursday 24 September 2009 01:01:58 you wrote:
> Ok... well, I guess that
> - whether it is something about your environment that is too different
> from ours (in which case build.sh is bad),
> - whether you have corrupted your installation (it could be by having
> a bad PATH value that makes original ocamlopt be mixed up with oc4mc
> ocamlopt)
>
> What I suggest is to use a default PATH (without modifying it for the
> purpose of OC4MC), and do these steps in a clean directory that is not
> included in PATH :
>
> 1) wget oc4mc-2009XXXX.tgz
> 2) tar xzf oc4mc-2009XXXX.tgz
> 3) cd oc4mc-2009XXXX
> 4) wget ocaml 3.10.2 (tar.gz or tar.bz2)
> 5) bash build.sh
> 6) cd tests
> 7) make matmul.th
> 8) time ./matmul.th 1000 8
>
> Sorry it's messy, we are thinking about something cleaner... (there's
> a matter of lack of time somewhere)

No problem. I'll be happy to get anything working!

Following your advice, it seems to work perfectly now:

$ ./matmul.th 500 1
Temp de calcul: utime 2.324145, stime 0.020001, rtime 2.325608
$ ./matmul.th 500 2
Temp de calcul: utime 1.780111, stime 0.000000, rtime 0.890797
$ ./matmul.th 500 3
Temp de calcul: utime 1.784111, stime 0.004000, rtime 0.608895
$ ./matmul.th 500 4
Temp de calcul: utime 1.764110, stime 0.004000, rtime 0.451214
$ ./matmul.th 500 5
Temp de calcul: utime 1.768111, stime 0.000000, rtime 0.393285
$ ./matmul.th 500 6
Temp de calcul: utime 1.924120, stime 0.004001, rtime 0.333215
$ ./matmul.th 500 7
Temp de calcul: utime 1.788112, stime 0.000000, rtime 0.302328
$ ./matmul.th 500 8
Temp de calcul: utime 1.992124, stime 0.000000, rtime 0.290383

Wow! 2.6x faster on 2 cores is good. ;-)

That's a really fantastic piece of work. I'll do my best to study it and write 
literature about it. May I ask, can you give a rough overview of the design? 
For example, is there a separate nursery per thread so each thread can 
allocate a certain amount before incurring a global pause? Do you have any 
ideas for libraries built on top of this, such as a task parallel library 
using work-stealing deques?

Thanks very much!!!

-- 
Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e