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Subject: Re: Test position ==> Aristarch 4.4 vs Tao 5.4 [from WinBoard Forum]

Author: Gian-Carlo Pascutto

Date: 23:39:17 08/08/02

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On August 09, 2002 at 00:00:31, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>This is useless testing.  You have two processes running and only one cpu.
>At any instant in time, one can hold a lock and the other can be spinning
>waiting on the lock.  The process scheduler has no idea which process is
>doing real work (the one holding the lock) or which is spinning (the one
>waiting on the lock).  So you burn cpu cycles needlessly.  If you have an
>idle loop (as I do using 'thread pools') then the same problem happens
>there... the scheduler can't tell which is actually searching for a position
>where the others can help, and which are spinning waiting on work doing nothing
>useful...

I must be missing something here, because that is exactly what I'm aiming at.

I want each process to get as close to 50% cpu utilisation as possible. That
means that they _have_ to burn cpu cycles even if they are not doing anything.

Spinning while waiting on a lock is lost performance when running parallel,
so I want to get loss there as well on the single cpu.

If I wouldn't do the busy-spin, and never split, my parallel stuff would
finish just as fast as the serial one, and I'd erronously conclude I've
got a 2.0 speedup. If I busy spin, I'll finish in double the time, and
correctly conclude no (1.0) speedup.

--
GCP



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