About my ParallelFor() that scales very well that uses my efficient Threadpool that scales very well

[amin...@gmail.com]

Hello,


About my ParallelFor() that scales very well that uses my efficient Threadpool that scales very well:

With ParallelFor() you have to:

1- Ensure Sufficient Work

Each iteration of a loop involves a certain amount of work,
so you have to ensure a sufficient amount of the work,
read below about "grainsize" that i have implemented.

2- In OpenMP we have that:

Static and Dynamic Scheduling

One basic characteristic of a loop schedule is whether it is static or dynamic:

• In a static schedule, the choice of which thread performs a particular
iteration is purely a function of the iteration number and number of
threads. Each thread performs only the iterations assigned to it at the
beginning of the loop.

• In a dynamic schedule, the assignment of iterations to threads can
vary at runtime from one execution to another. Not all iterations are
assigned to threads at the start of the loop. Instead, each thread
requests more iterations after it has completed the work already
assigned to it.

But with my ParallelFor() that scales very well, since it is using my efficient Threadpool that scales very well, so it is using Round-robin scheduling and it uses also work stealing, so i think that this is sufficient.

Read the rest:

My Threadpool engine with priorities that scales very well is really powerful because it scales very well on multicore and NUMA systems, also it comes with a ParallelFor() that scales very well on multicores and NUMA systems.

You can download it from:

https://sites.google.com/site/scalable68/an-efficient-threadpool-engine-with-priorities-that-scales-very-well


Here is the explanation of my ParallelFor() that scales very well:

I have also implemented a ParallelFor() that scales very well, here is the method:

procedure ParallelFor(nMin, nMax:integer;aProc: TParallelProc;GrainSize:integer=1;Ptr:pointer=nil;pmode:TParallelMode=pmBlocking;Priority:TPriorities=NORMAL_PRIORITY);

nMin and nMax parameters of the ParallelFor() are the minimum and maximum integer values of the variable of the ParallelFor() loop, aProc parameter of ParallelFor() is the procedure to call, and GrainSize integer parameter of ParallelFor() is the following:

The grainsize sets a minimum threshold for parallelization.

A rule of thumb is that grainsize iterations should take at least 100,000 clock cycles to execute.

For example, if a single iteration takes 100 clocks, then the grainsize needs to be at least 1000 iterations. When in doubt, do the following experiment:

1- Set the grainsize parameter higher than necessary. The grainsize is specified in units of loop iterations.

If you have no idea of how many clock cycles an iteration might take, start with grainsize=100,000.

The rationale is that each iteration normally requires at least one clock per iteration. In most cases, step 3 will guide you to a much smaller value.

2- Run your algorithm.

3- Iteratively halve the grainsize parameter and see how much the algorithm slows down or speeds up as the value decreases.

A drawback of setting a grainsize too high is that it can reduce parallelism. For example, if the grainsize is 1000 and the loop has 2000 iterations, the ParallelFor() method distributes the loop across only two processors, even if more are available.

And you can pass a parameter in Ptr as pointer to ParallelFor(), and you can set pmode parameter of to pmBlocking so that ParallelFor() is blocking or to pmNonBlocking so that ParallelFor() is non-blocking, and the Priority parameter is the priority of ParallelFor(). Look inside the test.pas example to see how to use it.


Thank you,
Amine Moulay Ramdane.