Re: [gentoo-user] openmp flag

2012-09-28 Thread Peter Weilbacher

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

2012-09-26 Thread Florian Philipp
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



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Re: [gentoo-user] openmp flag

2012-09-26 Thread 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...)

 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

2012-09-26 Thread Florian Philipp
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



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Re: [gentoo-user] openmp flag

2012-09-26 Thread Michael Mol
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

2012-09-25 Thread James
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

2012-09-25 Thread 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.

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

2012-09-25 Thread Neil Bothwick
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.


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[OT] Re: [gentoo-user] openmp flag

2012-09-25 Thread Peter Humphrey
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

2012-09-25 Thread Alan McKinnon
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

2012-09-25 Thread Michael Mol
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