As we all already have solved in assignment 1, the blocked assignment for Mandelbrot Set resulted in imbalance of workload. However, the interleaved assignment solved it because each consecutive row didn't much differ in the amount of computation.
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kayvonf
Question: Here I claim that the static assignment has "essentially zero" runtime overhead. What did it mean by this? When I say overhead, what is the baseline that I am comparing to? In slide 32 introduce the idea of dynamic assignment. What is the "overhead" of performing a dynamic assignment of work to worker threads in that example?
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rokhinip
@kayvonf: Presumably, in order for each worker unit (eg a pthread in the case of ISPC tasks) to know what chunk of work it needs to work on next, it would need to query some kind of global queue (or in the case of slide 34, it needs to read from count and atomically increment it). Maintaining this data structure which is distributing the work dynamically could lead to overhead costs.
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Dave
@kayvonf: the "overhead" of dynamic assignment is more broadly any logic the program needs to run to intelligently decompose the problem and assign tasks. In the above example, there is essentially zero overhead because assigning a row to a processor requires a single modulus operation. But if we instead dynamically decomposed work using a complex heuristic function and maintained tasks (as @rokhinip mentioned) in a queue, that potentially introduces a ton of overhead.
As we all already have solved in assignment 1, the blocked assignment for Mandelbrot Set resulted in imbalance of workload. However, the interleaved assignment solved it because each consecutive row didn't much differ in the amount of computation.
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.
Question: Here I claim that the static assignment has "essentially zero" runtime overhead. What did it mean by this? When I say overhead, what is the baseline that I am comparing to? In slide 32 introduce the idea of dynamic assignment. What is the "overhead" of performing a dynamic assignment of work to worker threads in that example?
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.
@kayvonf: Presumably, in order for each worker unit (eg a pthread in the case of ISPC tasks) to know what chunk of work it needs to work on next, it would need to query some kind of global queue (or in the case of slide 34, it needs to read from count and atomically increment it). Maintaining this data structure which is distributing the work dynamically could lead to overhead costs.
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.
@kayvonf: the "overhead" of dynamic assignment is more broadly any logic the program needs to run to intelligently decompose the problem and assign tasks. In the above example, there is essentially zero overhead because assigning a row to a processor requires a single modulus operation. But if we instead dynamically decomposed work using a complex heuristic function and maintained tasks (as @rokhinip mentioned) in a queue, that potentially introduces a ton of overhead.
This comment was marked helpful 0 times.