Re: [Caml-list] Smart ways to implement worker threads

[Eray Ozkural <examachine@gmail.com>]

It looks like the multi core architectures will be around for a while only to be superseded by more advanced parallel micro-architectures.

Of course computation-bound apps will benefit more but this does not mean that memory intensive apps will not run well on multi core architectures. Carefully optimized code will run great on multi core architectures with high memory bandwidth. Depending on the application of course.

Right now it seems to me that shared mem is more suitable for data mining apps (and many other including scientific computing apps). Data mining has never been embarrassingly parallel and it's difficult to get good speedup on distributed architectures. I should know I've worked on the parallel solution of two such problems. Provided that the space complexity is manageable, I think such network-bound cluster algorithms have more efficient counter-parts on multi-core. In data mining algos some data may have to be replicated or communicated. If the space doesn't blow up, NVIDIA Fermi would be ideal for those problems. No more copying. On the new Tesla max memory will be 6x4=24gb.

For all I care Intel is obsolete until they give me a thousand cores.

Shared memory support is essential at any rate. I don't see why we can't have it in an excellent way!

Best,

Eray