I found it hard to create a multi-thread version of my classic old "Prime Generator" program. The hardest part is I don't know the appropiate number of thread to create since I had no information about the system the program is runnning on. And the threading code just looks ugly .. developers with no multi-threading background will find it hard to understand and maintain. Take my old code for example.
The Rescue
This is where Microsoft Parallel Extensions to .NET Framework 3.5 comes in handy. It simplify the process of constructing the multithread code yourself. There are many useful stuffs under System.Threading.Parallel. But I find System.Threading.Parallel.For is the easiest to understand and utilize :)
Here is the plotting between the data set size and time used in millisecond on my machine with Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E6750 @ 2.66GHz. The System.Thread.Parallel.For actually takes extra computation time on the first call which makes me wonder why an ordinary for-loop outperforms parallel version at very first version of my benchmark. However, after the first call, the parallel version outperforms ordinary for-loop as expected.
I believe the results will be different on a quad core machine too :)
Hope this helps.
4 comments:
Hi m3rLinEz,
Nice post. However, let me add a small comment.
You are benchmarking an indeed very simple loop, taking into account the power of your CPU.
I think that a more serious benchmark should include more intensive processing and scale from 1 core to 4 cores.
That would help to present real-life conclusions.
Cheers,
Gastón
Hi Gastón,
I agree with you that I need more intensive processing tasks to reflect more real-life situation. The prime generator was the only thing I think of at the time :P
Thank you for the comment :)
Interesting!
Nice chart! Beautiful interface.
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