It's worth mentioning that Maya has been using Intel's Threading Building Blocks library internally in addition to OpenMP. Although it's not directly exposed through their API you could use the library directly to write threaded code. Unfortunately the vast majority of Maya API methods are still not thread-safe and thread safety is not documented.
So yeah I would definitely second the need for improved threading support across both applications. P.S. at least Maya has finally moved away from VS v90 platform, now it's only a couple of years behind... On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 11:49 PM, Raffaele Fragapane < raffsxsil...@googlemail.com> wrote: > Thanks for responding Chris. > > Well, for most of the old school ones (apps) it'd be an impossible amount > of work to make it truly pervasive, but to be honest given the domain of > cheap-shot parallelism in apps like Soft or Maya just making thread safe > (or offering mechanisms to find thread safe implementation boundaries) a > small portion of some accessors and various update functions would be a > huge leap forward. Documentation too. > > It's not a huge deal for the CUDA side of work since most of the time I > one works in the interval between host2device copy and device2host > copyback, the boundaries tend to be forced anyway, but the moment you don't > have CUDA and Titan speed memory in the picture (anything that needs to run > on a farm in example :) ), copying entire chunks of the geo data is rather > wasteful, not to mention slow, and the lack of native facilities for > pooling of any kind makes it hard to scale the threading meaningfully. > > Maya doesn't exactly do well across the board in those regards, but at > least with openMP, and this is a few years ago now, they added a mainthread > safe way to maintain a pool, and then slowly inched from there to sucking a > fair bit less . In Soft I still haven't quite found a way to not have a > crippling overhead. > Even a simple addition ala openMP, just to have a live pool, a couple lock > options, and basic wake-from-lazy to use raw references to geo would go a > very long way. > > It'd be nice if you guys would consider at least that much in the roadmap, > even if only as a "use at your own risk" and basic implementation. > > ICE is great and all, but it's not ALWAYS a viable option, and it tends to > cut off a good chunk of libraries and facilities that simply don't play > well in context. > Supporting compilers younger than a decade (and this holds true for Maya > too) would also be nice :) > > > > On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 3:56 PM, Chris Chia <chris.c...@autodesk.com>wrote: > >> I have yet heard any update on this. >> And I believe this would involve a lot of work for many DCCs. >> >> >> >> >> > > > -- > Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it > and let them flee like the dogs they are! > -- Technical Director @ DreamWorks Animation
