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digitalmars.D - D 2 target architectures

reply new2d <x x.x> writes:
Hi

I heard about D recently from a thread in the Gentoo Forums. My question is, if
I'm mostly interested in shared memory high performance computing, do the
radical new D 2 concurrency features help me at all? What I have in mind is
doing automatic map/reduce style of programming. I'm going to buy a new
hardware providing the AVX instruction set, possibly a two socket system. This
should improve loop vectorization a lot. How should it all work is via the
"native" foreach and Phobos 2 library features. Is this possible? Does Phobos 2
also use the three level cache architecture in Sandy Bridge efficiently? I was
considering D because I don't want to mess with low level assembly and use a
high level modern language instead. C++ is also getting there, in GCC 4.6 the
loop vectorization is already good.

I considered this competitor too http://www.scala-lang.org/node/8579. But they
have lot of work to do still. D 2 might get there first and be faster because
of no slow VM. Do you think the great minds of Phobos developers will beat
Scala's coming parallel features easily? Scala hasn't even implemented non-null
references and pure yet. You're probably using Google's SoC money to build
Phobos the next two summers and D has much more volunteers from Amazon and
Facebook doing code developing for free.
Jan 17 2011
parent reply Trass3r <un known.com> writes:
 I heard about D recently from a thread in the Gentoo Forums. My question
 is, if I'm mostly interested in shared memory high performance
 computing, do the radical new D 2 concurrency features help me at all?
 What I have in mind is doing automatic map/reduce style of programming.


Sounds like http://cis.jhu.edu/~dsimcha/d/phobos/std_parallelism.html will  
be your friend.
It's currently in the review stage, see thread "David Simcha's  
std.parallelism".



 I'm going to buy a new hardware providing the AVX instruction set,  
 possibly a two socket system. This should improve loop vectorization a  
 lot. How should it all work is via the "native" foreach and Phobos 2  
 library features. Is this possible? Does Phobos 2 also use the three  
 level cache architecture in Sandy Bridge efficiently? I was considering  
 D because I don't want to mess with low level assembly and use a high  
 level modern language instead. C++ is also getting there, in GCC 4.6 the  
 loop vectorization is already good.


Well array (or "vector") operations are currently optimized to leverage  
SSE - but this is no compiler optimization, it's hand-tuned code.
Apart from that there's GDC (using the gcc backend) and LDC (using LLVM as  
the backend) which potentially optimize a lot.
Jan 17 2011
parent reply new2d <too difficult.is> writes:
Trass3r Wrote:


 I heard about D recently from a thread in the Gentoo Forums. My question
 is, if I'm mostly interested in shared memory high performance
 computing, do the radical new D 2 concurrency features help me at all?
 What I have in mind is doing automatic map/reduce style of programming.


 
 Sounds like http://cis.jhu.edu/~dsimcha/d/phobos/std_parallelism.html will  
 be your friend.
 It's currently in the review stage, see thread "David Simcha's  
 std.parallelism".


Thanks! The documentation didn't help much in solving the low level details. It
isn't clear to me how it uses SSE or AVX. But.. gotta give it a go.


 I'm going to buy a new hardware providing the AVX instruction set,  
 possibly a two socket system. This should improve loop vectorization a  
 lot. How should it all work is via the "native" foreach and Phobos 2  
 library features. Is this possible? Does Phobos 2 also use the three  
 level cache architecture in Sandy Bridge efficiently? I was considering  
 D because I don't want to mess with low level assembly and use a high  
 level modern language instead. C++ is also getting there, in GCC 4.6 the  
 loop vectorization is already good.


 
 Well array (or "vector") operations are currently optimized to leverage  
 SSE - but this is no compiler optimization, it's hand-tuned code.
 Apart from that there's GDC (using the gcc backend) and LDC (using LLVM as  
 the backend) which potentially optimize a lot.


Why doesn't the "official" D compiler generate fast code? Is the main priority
reliability or standards conformance? But.. I'll test how well GDC works with
GCC 4.5 and 4.6.
Jan 17 2011
next sibling parent Trass3r <un known.com> writes:
 Thanks! The documentation didn't help much in solving the low level details. It


isn't clear to me how it uses SSE or AVX. But.. gotta give it a go.

I think std.parallelism will be more about thread-level parallelism rather than
SIMD.


 Why doesn't the "official" D compiler generate fast code? Is the main priority


reliability or standards conformance? But.. I'll test how well GDC works with
GCC
4.5 and 4.6.

dmd's backend isn't that advanced. But it provides a reference implementation of
the language whose frontend is reused in gdc and ldc.
Jan 18 2011
prev sibling parent Ellery Newcomer <ellery-newcomer utulsa.edu> writes:
On 01/17/2011 10:24 PM, new2d wrote:

 Why doesn't the "official" D compiler generate fast code? Is the main priority
reliability or standards conformance? But.. I'll test how well GDC works with
GCC 4.5 and 4.6.


My perception of DMD is that it may be adequately described as "Walter's 
playground". One of his main priorities (and points of pride) is 
efficiency of compilation, which is rather antithetical to reliability, 
as is the fact that he's maintaining it nearly on his own.

Concerning standards, they exist more completely in Walter's head and in 
the heads of others in the community than they do on paper or pixels 
anywhere that I'm aware of.
Jan 18 2011