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Subject: Re: Approaches to threading

Author: Sean Empey

Date: 10:27:43 06/16/04

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On June 16, 2004 at 13:12:33, Eric Oldre wrote:

>On June 16, 2004 at 12:36:08, Sean Empey wrote:
>
>>It's important to have an IO thread and a worker thread. But running on a multi
>>processor machine is not needed. If you only have a single thread; the engine
>>can't accept any input while it's thinking. You can look at it like a UI thread
>>and background thread. If I'm crunching numbers in the background I don't want
>>my GUI locked up until the background task has completed. If I need to stop it,
>>I don't want to have to close the app. It's really not too terribly difficult to
>>create and manage a worker thread. I didn't have too many problems implementing
>>it.
>
>
>Sean,
>I was/am planning on doing something much like you are describing. But some of
>the posts from Anthony Cozzie on the subject are making me think twice.
>According to him, managing the two threads actually gets pretty tricky to handle
>when there are actually multiple processors, something which i won't pick up on
>my home machine since it's an athlon64.
>
>Have you done any testing of storm on MP machines? if so, did you discover lots
>of issues that didn't show themselves on a single processor machine?
>
>Eric


Storm is actually designed to search using as many threads as set or as many
detected CPU's on the machine. It's a SMP program. The first versions did not
utilize SMP and I didn't have any issues running Storm on a quad. The IO and
worker thread worked fine as it did on a single processor machine. Anthony may
have implemented it completely different than I did, so had more problems. I
can't say though as I'm not familiar with his implementation. I have structures
and flags that get set within the worker thread and when it finishes I do stuff
based on those flags.

Sean



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