On 11/6/06, Joseph Wakeling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The second question is, what if I want to use Pthreads or something similar (which I'm just trying to teach myself)---do I have to do anything to restrict access to the rng? The GSL documentation claims that gsl is "thread-safe", but I don't know really what this means, whether GSL will sort everything out with respect to different threads' access of the rng, or whether I do have to take my own precautions.
For C libraries in general, and GSL in particular, "thread safe" simply means that there are no static variables in the library code that keep global state. If you look at e.g. strtok() from <string.h>, that's not thread safe because the library keeps state. The alternative design, which GSL follows quite strictly, is to leave it to client code to allocate workspace for any functions that need to keep state (think object-oriented programming in C, or strtok_r()). It's then up to the client code to make sure any workspace gets updated by one thread at a time. If you want to access a single random number generator from multiple threads, every call to produce a random number is a critical section, and you'd have to use your favorite synchronization mechanism to ensure atomic access. The better (IMO) alternative is to allocate one thread-local rng object per thread. Since there is no need for the different rngs to talk to each other, your code does not need to synchronize rng access, provided each thread can only see its own thread-local rng. -- mj _______________________________________________ Help-gsl mailing list Help-gsl@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-gsl
