When I am talking on forums or to some of my students, from time to time I realize that I have gotten so used to expecting a certain vocabulary and certain concepts to be known to others that it isn’t even funny. In German we call this being betriebsblind, which basically means nothing more than […]
As you may know from reading one of my last posts (e.g. the one regarding Scoped Locking in OpenMP), I am interested in issues regarding C++ and OpenMP. One of these is how to make exceptions work with OpenMP. In this article I am going to highlight the present state of affairs regarding exceptions in […]
Christopher Smith has tried very hard to come up with a case where a recursive lock is a good thing (TM). And while the article is very well thought out and presented, apparently David Butenhof (the creator of my favorite book on POSIX Threads) disagrees. Actually, it was the other way around, as Butenhofs article […]
Joe from scalability.org points to an interesting article. Apparently, ATI is moving into the field of stream processing. In this post, I will tell you a little about what stream processing is, what your graphics processor has to do with it and also what problems I see with it. But let me start by having […]
Time to write about some of the things I am doing at work again. As you may remember from my last article related to work, I am presently toying around with OpenMP and C++, trying to implement commonly used patterns there. What I want to write about today is not exactly a pattern, but rather […]
Do you know the difference between a mutex and a spinlock? You know exactly what kind of locks are employed in e.g. OpenMP? You find hierarchical locks boring and recursive spinlocks only make you yawn? Then you will most likely NOT enjoy reading this article, and I encourage you to stop reading now, as it […]
There have been various articles on the merits of different programming languages, both parallel and sequential, during the last week (notice how elegantly I have avoided the term language wars 😉 ): Joel has written about which (sequential) programming language to use for web-programming. He primarily compares Java and .NET, along with a little bit […]
Larry O’Brien has written an introductory article on parallel programming with OpenMP on Windows and announced it in his blog. I enjoyed reading the article and think it is a really nice resource for people new to parallel programming. I would like to comment some parts of his article and since it does not have […]
When reading any recent book about using C++ and parallel programming, you will probably be told that scoped locking is the greatest way to handle mutual exclusion and is in general the greatest invention since hot water. Yet, most of these writers are not talking about OpenMP, but about lower level threading systems. OpenMP has […]
Skimming through the activity logs of this blog, I can see that many people come here looking for information about pthread_setaffinity_np. I mentioned it briefly in my article about Opteron NUMA-effects, but barely touched it because I had found a more satisfying solution for my personal use (taskset). And while I do not have in […]