Re: [AD] Fwd: multithreading Allegro?

[Jon Rafkind <workmin@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Evert Glebbeek wrote:
> Got this.
> Does anyone have any clue what this is about, or is it just spam? If  
> not, should we care?
> As far as I recall, Allegro works properly on multi-core machines (or  
> did a while back anyway), so internally I think we're good. As for  
> supporting multithreaded programs with Allegro, I think the situation  
> is:
> 4.9 - we support it, it works. Nothing needed there.
> 4.2/3 - we don't support it, it doesn't work and it never will. Don't  
> care.
>
>   
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.

> Evert
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>   
> > From: "Ilya Mirman" <cilk@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > Date: Mon 29 Sep 2008 12:44:21 EDT (CA)
> > To: eglebbk@xxxxxxxxxx
> > Cc: cilk@xxxxxxxxxx
> > Subject: multithreading Allegro?
> >
> >
> > Message body follows:
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > I am wondering - is there demand for / interest in
> > multithreading Allegro?
> >
> > We at Cilk Arts will soon release Cilk++ (3 keywords and a
> > runtime system that extends C++ apps into the multicore
> > realm), and it'd be great to have interested folks in the
> > open source community join our Early Visibility Program.
> >
> > If it's something of interest, I'd be glad to chat further.
> >
> > Thank you,
> > ilya
> >
> >
> > --
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