Re: [AD] Fwd: multithreading Allegro?

[Peter Wang <novalazy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2008-10-04, Jon Rafkind <workmin@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I know of the Cilk project through other people (I worked with a girl 
> who was on the JCilk project, Cilk for java). The point doesn't seem to 
> be that you can *use* Allegro in a multithreaded fashion (I already use 
> 4.2 in multiple threads, just very carefully), but for the Allegro 
> internals to have code that tries to take advantage of multiple cores. 
> For instance writing for loops that automatically expand into parallel 
> versions. Its a clever way of utilizing multiple cores without 
> explicitly writing the fork/join code to do it.
> 
> Openmp is another way to achieve this, and it comes with gcc 4.3 and up. 
> I've only briefly looked at Cilk and openmp so I can't say which is 
> better nor even if we care about using it.. Perhaps some of the more 
> mathy routines in Allegro (like quaternions?) would enjoy multithreading.
> 
> If the api's are really easy to use and support our platforms it may be 
> worth looking into at some point.

I looked at Cilk a couple of years ago (not Cilk++, but should be
similar).  It's cool stuff.  But it *is* another language and needs to
be run through a pre-compiler.  I can't really think of anything in
Allegro itself which would benefit from the task parallelism to make the
hassle worthwhile.

Peter