Parallel Python

[robert]

sturlamolden wrote:
> Nick Maclaren wrote:
> 
> I wonder if too much emphasis is put on thread programming these days.
> Threads may be nice for programming web servers and the like, but not
> for numerical computing. Reading books about thread programming, one
> can easily get the impression that it is 'the' way to parallelize
> numerical tasks on computers with multiple CPUs (or multiple CPU


Most threads on this planet are not used for number crunching jobs, but for "organization of execution".

Also if one wants to exploit the speed of upcoming multi-core CPUs for all kinds of fine grained programs, things need fast fine grained communication - and most important: huge data trees in memory have to be shared effectively.
CPU frequencies will not grow anymore in the future, but we will see multi-cores/SMP. How to exploit them in a manner as if we had really faster CPU's: threads and thread-like techniques.

Things like MPI, IPC are just for the area of "small message, big job" - typically sci number crunching, where you collect the results "at the end of day". Its more a slow network technique.

A most challenging example on this are probably games - not to discuss about gaming here, but as tech example to the point: Would you do MPI, RPC etc. while 30fps 3D and real time physics simulation is going on?


Robert