Support for parallel processing can make demands on people's compiler, because ultimately there is no point writing parallel code for very old machines and newer machines will have newer compilers. If you are really serious about performance and using multi core machines, you are probably going to own a modern machine with the latest compiler. Of course it will always be possible to build MPIR in single core mode, which will be the default, so it is not like we are making a recent gcc a prerequisite to build MPIR.
In particular gcc 4.2.4 and following have OpenMP support built in. That means all the compilers which are derivatives of gcc will fairly shortly have OpenMP support if they don't already. Certainly the Intel compiler supports OpenMP and has for quite some time. As you say, the main issue is MSVC, which doesn't even have pthreads. Perhaps Brian knows whether VS 2010 will have OpenMP support? Bill. 2009/7/2 Jeff Gilchrist <jeff.gilchr...@gmail.com>: > > On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 10:22 AM, Bill Hart<goodwillh...@googlemail.com> wrote: > >> That is an interesting question. pthreads is certainly available on >> much older compilers. But the issue is, it is very hard to code. > > I guess it is the only thing I know, so maybe I should move to OpenMP. ;-) > >> I'd be interested in supporting pthreads if there was some performance >> benefit from doing so, but I actually think OpenMP is pretty good. >> >> I recall when parallelising using pthreads problems with about 500x500 >> = 250000 bits of data, or perhaps a little less, could be effectively >> parallelised. We are currently parallelising stuff effectively with >> 128000 bits of data. >> >> In other words, there doesn't seem to be any immediately obvious >> performance reason to consider pthreads. > > From a performance perspective, I have no idea. I was thinking more > from a support perspective. Pthreads is available on every system > under the sun (except MSVC natively). I haven't looked lately but do > any compilers come with OpenMP support built-in? I'm not sure how > easy it will be to get OpenMP working in MSVC (which doesn't really > support pthreads either so might have to make a Windows threads > version anyways). If OpenMP is widely supported now then it would > probably make more sense just to support one, the one that is easier. > > Jeff. > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mpir-devel" group. To post to this group, send email to mpir-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to mpir-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mpir-devel?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
