[LAU] Bye Bye 32 bit

Bill Purvis bill at billp.org
Wed Dec 27 14:22:58 UTC 2017


On 27/12/17 11:29, Jeremy Henty wrote:
> Len Ovens wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 27 Dec 2017, Jeremy Henty wrote:
>>
>>> Yes, but I  am not clear what  that means.  It could  mean "If you
>>> want I can split the work into concurrent processes/threads in the
>>> hope that  you have enough  cores to  benefit from this.".   Or it
>>> could mean "I  *will* pin different processes  to different cores,
>>> and I will fail if those cores aren't there.".
>> As a developer, I would not want my sw to fail because some *** user
>> told me to spread out my workload  over 12 cores when there are only
>> 4. I would want my sw to run and never crash.
> I  guess my  use of  the  word "fail"  was too  vague.  Obviously  the
> software should  not crash.  But  if the user specifies  an impossible
> combination of options  then the software should say  "I'm sorry Dave,
> I'm afraid  I can't do that"  rather than silently do  something other
> than what the user wanted.
>
> My impression is that at the moment  most users only get the option of
> telling the software "use as many  cores as you like" and the software
> does the rest  for itself, so the issue of  the user making impossible
> demands does  not arise.  It  would be nice to  know for sure  what is
> going on, but since I am neither a gamer or an audiophile I don't have
> the hardware or the incentive to do the research myself.
>
> Regards,
>
> Jeremy Henty
My understanding, for what it's worth (2p?) is that programs don't tell
the system how many cores to use, though they can impose an upper limit.
To use multiple cores, your create multiple threads, and the system, being
all-knowing, distributes them as it sees fit, possibly taking into account
any requests to limit the number of cores used. So a program that generates
1,000 threads will be able to take advantage of the new 1K-core processors,
but can still run on an old single core machine. If there is some cunning
way to specify an actual number of cores to be used, then the person who
wrote a program which uses that deserves to get lots of flak from people
using that program!

Bill

-- 
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| Bill Purvis                            |
| email: bill at billp.org                  |
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