Re: [eigen] Status of non-OpenMP-based multithreading

Hi,

The lack of openmp support would indeed be a good argument for providing alternatives, but which common platforms are not supported yet?

Regarding, the performance issues, again which platforms are suffering from those? I never really observed such issues and some of my HPC colleagues have also moved to OpenMP after performing extensive benchmarks...

Here are some numbers for matrix-matrix product (OpenMP) versus tensor contraction (C++11) for 100^2 matrices/ 2D tensors, 4 threads, OSX on Haswell:

gcc 4.7: 0.0438714ms / 0.165256ms

gcc 5 : 0.0452736ms / 0.169825ms

clang 3.7: 0.0287972ms / 0.163851ms

As the matrix sizes increase, the two versions converge to same perf.

gael

On Fri, Mar 4, 2016 at 9:31 PM, Mark Borgerding <mark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

It looks like TF's threadpool uses c++11 constructs. Won't that be a barrier to wide acceptance in Eigen?

What about a solution/discipline that uses boost::thread for c++03 and maybe std::thread for c++11? They are very similar. While boost::thread would be a new dependency for Eigen, it would only be necessary for those still tied to older compilers (like me) and boost::thread might be an easier dependency to swallow than OpenMP.

--Mark

PS. I echo the dislike for OpenMP. The implementations I've tried in gcc and intel seem like a collection of half-broken promises.

On 03/04/2016 02:51 PM, Rasmus Larsen wrote:

This is something that frustrates me as well. The tensor library has its own threadpool implementation and most operations are multi-threaded. In particular it provides a multi-threaded contraction, which is a super set of GEMM - Benoit Steiner can give more details. I would be in favor making this mechanism available to the rest of Eigen (maybe implement a simple ParallelFor mechanism on top of it for developers to use), such that we can provide multi-threading independent of OpenMP. I'd be happy to help.

Rasmus

On Fri, Mar 4, 2016 at 11:33 AM, Benoit Jacob <jacob.benoit.1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi,

I keep running into Eigen users who can't get good multithreading, either because their toolchain doesn't support OpenMP, or because they run into performance bugs in their OpenMP implementation.

I would like to know what is the current status of non-OpenMP-based multithreading in Eigen?

In particular, does the Tensor module offer its own implementation of a multi-threaded GEMM? Can that be merged into Core?

Cheers,

Benoit