Re: [gentoo-user] openmp flag
On 2012-09-26 20:25, Florian Philipp wrote: Am 25.09.2012 17:01, schrieb Michael Mol: On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 10:42 AM, James wirel...@tampabay.rr.com wrote: OH, anyone is encouraged to chime in about openmp and your thoughts as to it's viability and usefulness. Do you believe it will become a core technology, embedded into GCC? Used widely? I didn't understand this statement. It is a core technology and has been part of GCC since 4.2 or so. I certainly have used it since several years in some of my projects. But it certainly needs some little modifications to the code to work. If you can use it, use it. OpenMP is little more than a set of extensions to C (and C++) which allows the normally-scalar language to do some things in a parallel fashion without resorting to the costs of multithreading. This is good, because vector instructions have been available in x86 since MMX came out, and improvements to the vector instructions available to x86 still goes on. I guess this is just poorly phrased but to clarify: OpenMP *does* use multithreading and nothing else. It does not, in any way, make more use of vector instructions than GCC without -fopenmp. I guess what you mean is avoiding the costs of *manual* multithreading using POSIX threads and the like. To get GCC to try and use vectorization pass -ftree-vectorize. (You can see what loops it optimized using vectorization with -ftree-vectorizer-verbose=1). Cheers, Peter.
Re: [gentoo-user] openmp flag
Am 25.09.2012 17:01, schrieb Michael Mol: On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 10:42 AM, James wirel...@tampabay.rr.com wrote: Hello, background: It seems there is a major push now to put openmp: [1,2] into embedded systems [3]. So I looked at these [4] packages to find something interesting to look deeper into related to openMP. Blender immediately jumped out at me as a good example, cause an old friend Ken Hughes is, imho, one of the world's most amazing C programmers, and a stalwart at the blender project. OK, here's the question, I went to emerge blender and found that the openmp flag is already set. {?} Yet I looked everywhere and did not see the openmp flag set (/etc/make.conf, /etc/portage/package.use) so where is it getting set on my AMD workstation? [ebuild N ] media-gfx/blender-2.49b-r2 USE=ffmpeg nls ogg openmp -blender-game -openal -verse I feel like I should know (profiles etc) but, I'm a little bit brain_dead this am, so any help is appreciated. Packages can choose to have USE flags enabled or disabled for them by default. So blender likely has openmp enabled by default, without that affecting any other packages. OH, anyone is encouraged to chime in about openmp and your thoughts as to it's viability and usefulness. Do you believe it will become a core technology, embedded into GCC? Used widely? If you can use it, use it. OpenMP is little more than a set of extensions to C (and C++) which allows the normally-scalar language to do some things in a parallel fashion without resorting to the costs of multithreading. This is good, because vector instructions have been available in x86 since MMX came out, and improvements to the vector instructions available to x86 still goes on. I guess this is just poorly phrased but to clarify: OpenMP *does* use multithreading and nothing else. It does not, in any way, make more use of vector instructions than GCC without -fopenmp. I guess what you mean is avoiding the costs of *manual* multithreading using POSIX threads and the like. If you want to use vector instructions for your own code, you should look into compiler intrinsics (i.e. vector instructions as built-in C functions). http://ds9a.nl/gcc-simd/ And, just to nit-pick: OpenMP also works for Fortran. Related are CUDA and OpenCL, which are two other systems for parallelizing code. CUDA assumes you have access to an nVidia GPU (and have a CUDA-enabled driver installed). OpenCL is a big more generic, and supports dispatching to CUDA, CPU vector instructions or even thread pools. Personally, my recommendation is to enable everything you can get working (be it, OpenMP, CUDA or OpenCL); vector processing is going to be generally more efficient than scalar processing. You don't need to worry about which is better unless you're a software developer. (And if you're a software developer, go study up on their differences; tradeoffs happen.) +1 By the way: Did anyone get good results out of dev-util/intel-ocl-sdk for OpenCL? Some time ago I tested it with a package that supported both OpenMP and OpenCL (not sure which) and OpenCL didn't really make an impact on my Core i5. Regards, Florian Philipp signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] openmp flag
On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 2:25 PM, Florian Philipp li...@binarywings.net wrote: Am 25.09.2012 17:01, schrieb Michael Mol: On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 10:42 AM, James wirel...@tampabay.rr.com wrote: Hello, background: It seems there is a major push now to put openmp: [1,2] into embedded systems [3]. So I looked at these [4] packages to find something interesting to look deeper into related to openMP. Blender immediately jumped out at me as a good example, cause an old friend Ken Hughes is, imho, one of the world's most amazing C programmers, and a stalwart at the blender project. OK, here's the question, I went to emerge blender and found that the openmp flag is already set. {?} Yet I looked everywhere and did not see the openmp flag set (/etc/make.conf, /etc/portage/package.use) so where is it getting set on my AMD workstation? [ebuild N ] media-gfx/blender-2.49b-r2 USE=ffmpeg nls ogg openmp -blender-game -openal -verse I feel like I should know (profiles etc) but, I'm a little bit brain_dead this am, so any help is appreciated. Packages can choose to have USE flags enabled or disabled for them by default. So blender likely has openmp enabled by default, without that affecting any other packages. OH, anyone is encouraged to chime in about openmp and your thoughts as to it's viability and usefulness. Do you believe it will become a core technology, embedded into GCC? Used widely? If you can use it, use it. OpenMP is little more than a set of extensions to C (and C++) which allows the normally-scalar language to do some things in a parallel fashion without resorting to the costs of multithreading. This is good, because vector instructions have been available in x86 since MMX came out, and improvements to the vector instructions available to x86 still goes on. I guess this is just poorly phrased but to clarify: OpenMP *does* use multithreading and nothing else. It does not, in any way, make more use of vector instructions than GCC without -fopenmp. I guess what you mean is avoiding the costs of *manual* multithreading using POSIX threads and the like. Fair point. If you want to use vector instructions for your own code, you should look into compiler intrinsics (i.e. vector instructions as built-in C functions). http://ds9a.nl/gcc-simd/ Personally, I don't like compiler intrinsics; they're specific to given compilers. I've tended to write code which is supposed to compile on multiple compilers. (There's a world outside GCC...) And, just to nit-pick: OpenMP also works for Fortran. True; this slipped my mind. :) Related are CUDA and OpenCL, which are two other systems for parallelizing code. CUDA assumes you have access to an nVidia GPU (and have a CUDA-enabled driver installed). OpenCL is a big more generic, and supports dispatching to CUDA, CPU vector instructions or even thread pools. Personally, my recommendation is to enable everything you can get working (be it, OpenMP, CUDA or OpenCL); vector processing is going to be generally more efficient than scalar processing. You don't need to worry about which is better unless you're a software developer. (And if you're a software developer, go study up on their differences; tradeoffs happen.) +1 By the way: Did anyone get good results out of dev-util/intel-ocl-sdk for OpenCL? Some time ago I tested it with a package that supported both OpenMP and OpenCL (not sure which) and OpenCL didn't really make an impact on my Core i5. Haven't tried it, no. I've got a Radeon 6870, and I can only have one OpenCL driver loaded at a time. (IBM has a middleman driver which supports dispatching to multiple backends, but I believe its a for-pay package.) -- :wq
Re: [gentoo-user] openmp flag
Am 26.09.2012 21:46, schrieb Michael Mol: On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 2:25 PM, Florian Philipp li...@binarywings.net wrote: Am 25.09.2012 17:01, schrieb Michael Mol: On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 10:42 AM, James wirel...@tampabay.rr.com wrote: Hello, background: It seems there is a major push now to put openmp: [1,2] into embedded systems [3]. So I looked at these [4] packages to find something interesting to look deeper into related to openMP. Blender immediately jumped out at me as a good example, cause an old friend Ken Hughes is, imho, one of the world's most amazing C programmers, and a stalwart at the blender project. OK, here's the question, I went to emerge blender and found that the openmp flag is already set. {?} Yet I looked everywhere and did not see the openmp flag set (/etc/make.conf, /etc/portage/package.use) so where is it getting set on my AMD workstation? [ebuild N ] media-gfx/blender-2.49b-r2 USE=ffmpeg nls ogg openmp -blender-game -openal -verse I feel like I should know (profiles etc) but, I'm a little bit brain_dead this am, so any help is appreciated. Packages can choose to have USE flags enabled or disabled for them by default. So blender likely has openmp enabled by default, without that affecting any other packages. OH, anyone is encouraged to chime in about openmp and your thoughts as to it's viability and usefulness. Do you believe it will become a core technology, embedded into GCC? Used widely? If you can use it, use it. OpenMP is little more than a set of extensions to C (and C++) which allows the normally-scalar language to do some things in a parallel fashion without resorting to the costs of multithreading. This is good, because vector instructions have been available in x86 since MMX came out, and improvements to the vector instructions available to x86 still goes on. I guess this is just poorly phrased but to clarify: OpenMP *does* use multithreading and nothing else. It does not, in any way, make more use of vector instructions than GCC without -fopenmp. I guess what you mean is avoiding the costs of *manual* multithreading using POSIX threads and the like. Fair point. If you want to use vector instructions for your own code, you should look into compiler intrinsics (i.e. vector instructions as built-in C functions). http://ds9a.nl/gcc-simd/ Personally, I don't like compiler intrinsics; they're specific to given compilers. I've tended to write code which is supposed to compile on multiple compilers. (There's a world outside GCC...) Yes. I haven't used it, either. I guess you could autoconf it and replace it with vanilla C macros in most cases. Or as an easier solution: #ifdef a vanilla C implementation together with the vector code. Bonus points for added readability. Kind of makes you wonder how well GCC can vectorize programs on its own when you lay out your code in a way suitable for its own intrinsics without actually using them. And, just to nit-pick: OpenMP also works for Fortran. True; this slipped my mind. :) Related are CUDA and OpenCL, which are two other systems for parallelizing code. CUDA assumes you have access to an nVidia GPU (and have a CUDA-enabled driver installed). OpenCL is a big more generic, and supports dispatching to CUDA, CPU vector instructions or even thread pools. Personally, my recommendation is to enable everything you can get working (be it, OpenMP, CUDA or OpenCL); vector processing is going to be generally more efficient than scalar processing. You don't need to worry about which is better unless you're a software developer. (And if you're a software developer, go study up on their differences; tradeoffs happen.) +1 By the way: Did anyone get good results out of dev-util/intel-ocl-sdk for OpenCL? Some time ago I tested it with a package that supported both OpenMP and OpenCL (not sure which) and OpenCL didn't really make an impact on my Core i5. Haven't tried it, no. I've got a Radeon 6870, and I can only have one OpenCL driver loaded at a time. (IBM has a middleman driver which supports dispatching to multiple backends, but I believe its a for-pay package.) Isn't that what app-admin/eselect-opencl is for? I mean simple switching, not dual application (which would be awesome, too). Regards, Florian Philipp signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] openmp flag
On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 5:03 PM, Florian Philipp li...@binarywings.net wrote: Am 26.09.2012 21:46, schrieb Michael Mol: On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 2:25 PM, Florian Philipp li...@binarywings.net wrote: Am 25.09.2012 17:01, schrieb Michael Mol: On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 10:42 AM, James wirel...@tampabay.rr.com wrote: [snip] If you want to use vector instructions for your own code, you should look into compiler intrinsics (i.e. vector instructions as built-in C functions). http://ds9a.nl/gcc-simd/ Personally, I don't like compiler intrinsics; they're specific to given compilers. I've tended to write code which is supposed to compile on multiple compilers. (There's a world outside GCC...) Yes. I haven't used it, either. I guess you could autoconf it and replace it with vanilla C macros in most cases. Or as an easier solution: #ifdef a vanilla C implementation together with the vector code. Bonus points for added readability. And the added maintenance, doubling the number of builds to test. :) Kind of makes you wonder how well GCC can vectorize programs on its own when you lay out your code in a way suitable for its own intrinsics without actually using them. [snip] By the way: Did anyone get good results out of dev-util/intel-ocl-sdk for OpenCL? Some time ago I tested it with a package that supported both OpenMP and OpenCL (not sure which) and OpenCL didn't really make an impact on my Core i5. Haven't tried it, no. I've got a Radeon 6870, and I can only have one OpenCL driver loaded at a time. (IBM has a middleman driver which supports dispatching to multiple backends, but I believe its a for-pay package.) Isn't that what app-admin/eselect-opencl is for? I mean simple switching, not dual application (which would be awesome, too). Dual-application is the circumstance IBM handles. Including dispatching over the network. :) -- :wq
[gentoo-user] openmp flag
Hello, background: It seems there is a major push now to put openmp: [1,2] into embedded systems [3]. So I looked at these [4] packages to find something interesting to look deeper into related to openMP. Blender immediately jumped out at me as a good example, cause an old friend Ken Hughes is, imho, one of the world's most amazing C programmers, and a stalwart at the blender project. OK, here's the question, I went to emerge blender and found that the openmp flag is already set. {?} Yet I looked everywhere and did not see the openmp flag set (/etc/make.conf, /etc/portage/package.use) so where is it getting set on my AMD workstation? [ebuild N ] media-gfx/blender-2.49b-r2 USE=ffmpeg nls ogg openmp -blender-game -openal -verse I feel like I should know (profiles etc) but, I'm a little bit brain_dead this am, so any help is appreciated. OH, anyone is encouraged to chime in about openmp and your thoughts as to it's viability and usefulness. Do you believe it will become a core technology, embedded into GCC? Used widely? James [1] http://www.open-mpi.org/ [2] http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/openmp [3] http://www.embedded.com/design/programming-languages-and-tools/4396218/What-the-new-OpenMP-standard-brings-to-embedded-multicore-software-design?cid=Newsletter+-+Whats+New+on+Embedded.com [4] http://gentoobrowse.randomdan.homeip.net/use/openmp
Re: [gentoo-user] openmp flag
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 10:42 AM, James wirel...@tampabay.rr.com wrote: Hello, background: It seems there is a major push now to put openmp: [1,2] into embedded systems [3]. So I looked at these [4] packages to find something interesting to look deeper into related to openMP. Blender immediately jumped out at me as a good example, cause an old friend Ken Hughes is, imho, one of the world's most amazing C programmers, and a stalwart at the blender project. OK, here's the question, I went to emerge blender and found that the openmp flag is already set. {?} Yet I looked everywhere and did not see the openmp flag set (/etc/make.conf, /etc/portage/package.use) so where is it getting set on my AMD workstation? [ebuild N ] media-gfx/blender-2.49b-r2 USE=ffmpeg nls ogg openmp -blender-game -openal -verse I feel like I should know (profiles etc) but, I'm a little bit brain_dead this am, so any help is appreciated. Packages can choose to have USE flags enabled or disabled for them by default. So blender likely has openmp enabled by default, without that affecting any other packages. OH, anyone is encouraged to chime in about openmp and your thoughts as to it's viability and usefulness. Do you believe it will become a core technology, embedded into GCC? Used widely? If you can use it, use it. OpenMP is little more than a set of extensions to C (and C++) which allows the normally-scalar language to do some things in a parallel fashion without resorting to the costs of multithreading. This is good, because vector instructions have been available in x86 since MMX came out, and improvements to the vector instructions available to x86 still goes on. Related are CUDA and OpenCL, which are two other systems for parallelizing code. CUDA assumes you have access to an nVidia GPU (and have a CUDA-enabled driver installed). OpenCL is a big more generic, and supports dispatching to CUDA, CPU vector instructions or even thread pools. Personally, my recommendation is to enable everything you can get working (be it, OpenMP, CUDA or OpenCL); vector processing is going to be generally more efficient than scalar processing. You don't need to worry about which is better unless you're a software developer. (And if you're a software developer, go study up on their differences; tradeoffs happen.) -- :wq
Re: [gentoo-user] openmp flag
On Tue, 25 Sep 2012 11:01:52 -0400, Michael Mol wrote: OK, here's the question, I went to emerge blender and found that the openmp flag is already set. {?} Yet I looked everywhere and did not see the openmp flag set (/etc/make.conf, /etc/portage/package.use) so where is it getting set on my AMD workstation? [ebuild N ] media-gfx/blender-2.49b-r2 USE=ffmpeg nls ogg openmp -blender-game -openal -verse I feel like I should know (profiles etc) but, I'm a little bit brain_dead this am, so any help is appreciated. Packages can choose to have USE flags enabled or disabled for them by default. So blender likely has openmp enabled by default, without that affecting any other packages. However in this case, the flag is not set in the ebuild. Eix shows a + before the USE flag if it is enabled in the ebuild. The one place the OP didn't appear to check was the output from emerge --info. The flag is set on this system, with a desktop profile. -- Neil Bothwick Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
[OT] Re: [gentoo-user] openmp flag
On Tuesday 25 September 2012 20:06:15 Neil Bothwick wrote: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. That's a version of Occam's Razor, isn't it? Otherwise known as Do not complicate beyond necessity. -- Rgds Peter
Re: [OT] Re: [gentoo-user] openmp flag
On Tue, 25 Sep 2012 22:56:59 +0100 Peter Humphrey pe...@humphrey.ukfsn.org wrote: On Tuesday 25 September 2012 20:06:15 Neil Bothwick wrote: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. That's a version of Occam's Razor, isn't it? Otherwise known as Do not complicate beyond necessity. It's a tautology. You cannot make something any simpler than the simplest you can possibly make it, so the last but no simpler is redundant -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [OT] Re: [gentoo-user] openmp flag
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 6:46 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, 25 Sep 2012 22:56:59 +0100 Peter Humphrey pe...@humphrey.ukfsn.org wrote: On Tuesday 25 September 2012 20:06:15 Neil Bothwick wrote: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. That's a version of Occam's Razor, isn't it? Otherwise known as Do not complicate beyond necessity. It's a tautology. You cannot make something any simpler than the simplest you can possibly make it, so the last but no simpler is redundant The but no simpler is there as a reminder that it's possible to over-simplify. -- :wq