The Cache and Multithreading

http://austingwalters.com/the-cache-and-multithreading/

by jlemoine • 12 years ago

36 5 12 years ago

pron• 12 years ago

For all those interested in this subject, I'd like to recommend Nitsan Wakart's blog, http://psy-lob-saw.blogspot.com/, which is dedicated to mechanical sympathy relating to concurrency and the memory system.

tjaerv• 12 years ago

And, of course, the Mechanical Sympathy blog itself:

http://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com

deletes• 12 years ago

Comment on the blog that got deleted:

I did a similar test in C and have gotten very similar results. When N is around 4000 the trashing version starts to differ substantially. A 3x difference can already be seen when N is 1000.

This means if your program is running on two threads over different parts of the matrix, every single iteration requires a request to RAM.

I'm skeptical over this part, I have tried to replicate this behavior but was unsuccessful. Even though cores are sharing L3, I doubt that a thread will overwrite the entire cache on every iteration.

lettergram• 12 years ago

Author here, I have to manually approve comments, and did not delete this one (way too much spam not to do so), sorry. Different compilers and architecture will have different results, I explained that in a previous post.

Either way, you should see a noticeable difference as the size increases, which was the point.

replicant• 12 years ago

The first 2 examples are not dividing the work between the threads, but having each of the threads repeat the full work, which is not poor OpenMP use, but wrong use. I would have also used the collapse directive and played a little bit with the schedule. Finally, looping in the inner loop through the first index is not a good idea not only when working with OpenMP.

The Cache and Multithreading

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