[Cython] prange CEP updated

[mark florisson]

On 5 April 2011 22:29, Dag Sverre Seljebotn <d.s.seljebotn at astro.uio.no> wrote:
> I've done a pretty major revision to the prange CEP, bringing in a lot of
> the feedback.
>
> Thread-private variables are now split in two cases:
>
>  i) The safe cases, which really require very little technical knowledge ->
> automatically inferred
>
>  ii) As an advanced feature, unsafe cases that requires some knowledge of
> threading -> must be explicitly declared
>
> I think this split simplifies things a great deal.
>
> I'm rather excited over this now; this could turn out to be a really
> user-friendly and safe feature that would not only allow us to support
> OpenMP-like threading, but be more convenient to use in a range of common
> cases.
>
> http://wiki.cython.org/enhancements/prange
>
> Dag Sverre
>
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>

If we want to support cython.parallel.threadsavailable outside of
parallel regions (which does not depend on the schedule used for
worksharing constructs!), then we have to disable dynamic scheduling.
For instance, if OpenMP sees some OpenMP threads are already busy,
then with dynamic scheduling it dynamically establishes how many
threads to use for any parallel region.
So basically, if you put omp_get_num_threads() in a parallel region,
you have a race when you depend on that result in a subsequent
parallel region, because the number of busy OpenMP threads may have
changed.

So basically, to make threadsavailable() work outside parallel
regions, we'd have to disable dynamic scheduling (omp_set_dynamic(0)).
Of course, when OpenMP cannot request the amount of threads desired
(because they are bounded by a configurable thread limit (and the OS
of course)), the behaviour will be implementation defined. So then we
could just put a warning in the docs for that, and users can check for
this in the parallel region using threadsavailable() if it's really
important.

Does that sound like a good idea? And should I update the CEP?