Hi Larry,

Would this also affect OSL? Or would TBB still be needed there?

Best, Erich

On Jun 14, 2012, at 5:13 PM, Larry Gritz wrote:

> Anybody else want to comment or report timings?
> 
> Are there any objections to my committing this to the master (i.e. improve 
> the non-TBB case, but not yet change the default for USE_TBB)?
> 
> I'm also still open to changing USE_TBB to default to 0, or even removing TBB 
> entirely, if everybody's timings show that non-TBB is not significantly worse 
> than TBB across a wide variety of hardware and OS configurations.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Jun 12, 2012, at 12:23 AM, Larry Gritz wrote:
> 
>> https://github.com/OpenImageIO/oiio/pull/273
>> 
>> This was from a few months back, I didn't have enough success to push for a 
>> commit, but now I have a major update:
>> 
>> After some weekend reading, I had some ideas for how to improve the spin 
>> locks and just pushed an update in which, on my two machines (a Mac OS X 
>> laptop, and a 12-core Linux box), my non-TBB spinlock now outperforms the 
>> TBB spinlocks (by a significant margin on Linux!).
>> 
>> Could those of you on this thread please try this out?  Check out the branch 
>> for this pull request, do "make nuke ; make USE_TBB=1 ; make test 
>> TEST=spinlock" and then the same thing again with USE_TBB=0 (be sure to do a 
>> full make nuke first).
>> 
>> If the rest of you find the same thing -- that the USE_TBB=0 benchmark is no 
>> slower than the USE_TBB=1 -- then perhaps we can finally retire TBB.
>> 
>> For the curious, the three improvements were: 
>> 
>> (a) exponential backoff for spin lock contention in the same manner that TBB 
>> was doing;
>> 
>> (b) try_lock can spin more efficiency with read-only (non-bus-locking) check 
>> until there's a good chance that the lock was released.  In particular, you 
>> should not spin like this:
>> 
>>  while (! try_lock(&thelock)) ;
>> 
>> but instead
>> 
>>   while (! try_lock(&thelock))
>>       while (thelock) ;
>> 
>> This is because the try_lock does a compare-and-swap, which is a writing 
>> operation, which will lock the bus.  In the latter version, if the initial 
>> (bus-locking) try-lock fails, it will do a read-only (non-bus-locking!) 
>> check until the lock appears to be free, then do the safe/locking one again.
>> 
>> (c) on x86_64, it's safe for spin_lock::unlock() to do a normal unlocked 
>> write.  The memory ordering of these chips is such that it doesn't need the 
>> memory fences of a full atomic write.  I found numerous sources for this on 
>> the net, and it is a big win.  Apparently, it also works on some 32 bit 
>> x86's, most of the recent chips, but I am not very interested in sorting out 
>> which x86 chips it's safe to do it on, especially since anybody heavily 
>> threaded enough to be concerned with this optimization is on a 64 bit system.
>> 
>> OK, so let me know!  If it works, it's a performance improvement as well as 
>> a way for us to shed the pesky TBB dependency.  Win, win.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Apr 3, 2012, at 10:34 AM, Larry Gritz wrote:
>> 
>>> I would very much appreciate if people could grab the code from this pull 
>>> request, and run:
>>> 
>>>     build/ARCH/libOpenImageIO/atomic_test
>>>     build/ARCH/libOpenImageIO/spinlock_test
>>> 
>>> and report the timings after a fresh compile with USE_TBB ON, and again 
>>> with USE_TBB OFF.  (On Linux and OSX, if you prefer running from 'make', 
>>> then just run 'make nuke ; make USE_TBB=1' or 'make nuke ; make USE_TBB=0'. 
>>>  On Windows, or if you prefer otherwise, just set the CMake variable 
>>> USE_TBB to ON or OFF, respectively.)
>>> 
>>> I'm especially keen to hear the results from people on Windows, as that is 
>>> the major platform that I have no way to test myself.
>>> 
>>> If this makes it appear that there is no speed penalty from falling back on 
>>> the gcc & win32 intrinsics, compared to TBB, then I think we should 
>>> simplify our lives by removing TBB use entirely from OIIO.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Apr 3, 2012, at 10:25 AM, Larry Gritz wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Make atomic_test and spinlock_test run for many more iterations, and time 
>>>> their results.
>>>> 
>>>> This allows us to rigorously compare the speed of our atomics and spin 
>>>> locks.
>>>> Also make their output a little neater by locking around the status 
>>>> printouts, and
>>>> eliminate the #if's that provide safety for Boost < 1.35, which is no 
>>>> longer supported.
>>>> 
>>>> You can merge this Pull Request by running:
>>>> 
>>>> git pull https://github.com/lgritz/oiio lg-atomic
>>>> 
>>>> Or you can view, comment on it, or merge it online at:
>>>> 
>>>> https://github.com/OpenImageIO/oiio/pull/273
>>>> 
>>>> -- Commit Summary --
>>>> 
>>>> * Make atomic_test and spinlock_test run for many more iterations, and 
>>>> time their results.
>>>> 
>>>> -- File Changes --
>>>> 
>>>> M src/libOpenImageIO/atomic_test.cpp (38)
>>>> M src/libOpenImageIO/spinlock_test.cpp (29)
>>>> 
>>>> -- Patch Links --
>>>> 
>>>> https://github.com/OpenImageIO/oiio/pull/273.patch
>>>> https://github.com/OpenImageIO/oiio/pull/273.diff
>>>> 
>>>> --- 
>>>> Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
>>>> https://github.com/OpenImageIO/oiio/pull/273
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Oiio-dev mailing list
>>>> [email protected]
>>>> http://lists.openimageio.org/listinfo.cgi/oiio-dev-openimageio.org
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Larry Gritz
>>> [email protected]
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Oiio-dev mailing list
>>> [email protected]
>>> http://lists.openimageio.org/listinfo.cgi/oiio-dev-openimageio.org
>> 
>> --
>> Larry Gritz
>> [email protected]
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Oiio-dev mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> http://lists.openimageio.org/listinfo.cgi/oiio-dev-openimageio.org
> 
> --
> Larry Gritz
> [email protected]
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Oiio-dev mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://lists.openimageio.org/listinfo.cgi/oiio-dev-openimageio.org

_______________________________________________
Oiio-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.openimageio.org/listinfo.cgi/oiio-dev-openimageio.org

Reply via email to