Thursday, February 20, 2014

ParaSail Work Stealing speeds up

We are now releasing revision 5.2 of the ParaSail compiler and interpreter, which incorporates a new implementation of work stealing.  Links to both binaries and sources can be found at:

    http://parasail-lang.org

in the Documentation and Download section of the web page.

Here is the new entry in the release notes for revision 5.2:

* [rev 5.2] Re-implementation of work stealing to reduce contention between processors.  Each server now has a private double-ended queue (deque) of pico-threads, along with the shared triplet of deques which has existed before.  This produced another two times speedup (in addition to the rev 4.9 improvements), thereby speeding up execution by four times or more since rev 4.8. The main procedures for each language (ParaSail, Sparkel, etc.) have been refactored to share more common code. Allow a command-line flag "-servers nnn" to specify the number of heavy-weight server threads to use.  Default is 6. Command can also be given interactively, as "servers nnn". Interactively it only works to increase the number; there is no way to shut down servers that already have been activated.

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