[Numpy-discussion] Fast threading solution thoughts

[Matthieu Brucher]

2009/2/12 Sturla Molden <sturla at molden.no>:
> On 2/12/2009 1:50 PM, Francesc Alted wrote:
>
>> Hey!  That's very nice to know.  We already have OpenMP support in
>> Cython for free (or apparently it seems so :-)
>
> Not we don't, as variable names are different in C and Cython. But
> adding support for OpenMP would not bloat the Cython language.
>
> Cython must exhange the variable names and leave the comment in C as a
> pragma to the C compiler.
>
> IMHO, OpenMP is the easiest way to use parallel computing in scientific
> projects. It is much easier than manually fiddling with threads,
> processes, MPI, etc. Just write code as you normally would, debug and
> verify. Then you spend five minutes inserting pragmas to the compiler,
> and et voilá you have a parallel program. The same code will then
> compile and run correctly for parallel or sequential execution,
> depending on a compiler switch (-fopenmp). You get load balancing for
> free, as that is built into OpenMP. OpenMPs API is so small that it just
> takes 10 minutes to learn.
>
> OpenMP currently works on SMPs (e.g. multicore CPUs), but there is work
> going on to port it to clusters as well.

In this matter, I think OpenMP will never be used. Besides, OpenMP
doesn't even support an unsigned int for a parallel loop variable.

Matthieu
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