On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 5:53 AM, Armin Rigo <arigo@tunes.org> wrote:
Hi Bengt,
On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 1:40 PM, Bengt Richter <bokr@oz.net> wrote:
Just a triggered thought: I am wondering if Conway's Game of Life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life might be be an interesting/fun basis for experiments and maybe a benchmark for STM use in the parallel update of the life grid.
I am thinking of in-place update, since old-frame -> new-frame would not create any conflicts.
I suppose the boring answer is that old-frame -> new-frame looks more natural. Even if not, I can think about different answers, but it doesn't seem that STM as I think about it is really related to them. STM in PyPy is merely an "implementation detail" to speed up a GIL-like user experience.
In other words, the GIL is a point of contention even when the application code is not sharing data between threads. Correct? If we're looking for benchmark problems which are not trivially parallelized, STAMP[0] is probably a great place to start. [0] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.139.472