[pypy-dev] PyPy STM

[Randall Leeds]

On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 5:53 AM, Armin Rigo <arigo at tunes.org> wrote:
> Hi Bengt,
>
> On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 1:40 PM, Bengt Richter <bokr at 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