can i easily write a program to make use of Intel's Quad core or i7 chip if only 1 thread is used?

Question

I wonder if in my program I have only 1 thread, can I write it so that the Quad core or i7 can actually make use of the different cores? Usually when i write programs on a Quad core computer, the CPU usage will only go to about 25%, and the work seems to be divided among the 4 cores, as the Task Manager shows. (the programs i wrote usually is Ruby, Python, or PHP, so they may not be so much optimized).

Update: what if i write it in C or C++ instead, and

for (i = 0; i < 100000000; i++) {
  a = i * 2;
  b = i + 1;
  if (a == ...  || b == ...) { ... }
}

and then use the highest level of optimization with the compiler. can the compiler make the multiplication happen on one core, and the addition happen on a different core, and therefore make 2 cores work at the same time? isn't that a fairly easy optimization to use 2 cores?

Answer 1

No. You need to use threads to execute multiple paths concurrently on multiple CPU's (be they real or virtual)... execution of one thread is inherently bound to one CPU as this maintains the "happens before" relationship between statements, which is central to how programs work.

Answer 2

Implicit parallelism is probably what you are looking for.

Answer 3

If your application code is single-threaded multiple processors/cores will only be used if:

• the libraries you use are using multiple threads (perhaps hiding this usage behind a simple interface)
• your application spawns other processes to perform some part of its operation

Ruby, Python and PHP applications can all be written to use multiple threads, however.

Answer 4

A single threaded program will only use one core. The operating system might well decide to shift the program between cores from time to time - according to some rules to balance the load etc. So you will see only 25% usage overall and the all four cores working - but only one at once.

Answer 5

Since you are talking about 'task manager', you appear to be running on Windows. However, if you are running a webserver on there (for Ruby or PHP with fcgi or Apache pre-forking, ant to a lesser extent other Apache workers), with multiple processes, then they would tend to spread out across the cores.

If only a single program without threading is running, then, no, no significant advantage will come from that - you're only ruinning one thing at a time, other than OS-driven background processes.

Answer 6

The only way to use multiple cores without using multithreading is to use multiple programs.

In your example above, one program could handle 0-2499999, the next 2500000-4999999, and so on. Set all four of them off at the same time, and they will use all four cores.

Usually you would be better off writing a (single) multithreaded program.

Answer 7

First, unless multiple threads are created in the program, then there is only a single thread of execution in that program.

Seeing 25% of CPU resources being used for the program is an indication that a single core out of four is being utilized at 100%, but all other cores are not being used. If all cores were used, then it would be theoretically possible for the process to hog 100% of the CPU resources.

As a side note, the graphs shown in Task Manager in Windows is the CPU utilization by all processes running at the time, not only for one process.

Secondly, the code you present could be split into code which can execute on two separate threads in order to execute on two cores. I am guessing that you want to show that a and b are independent of each other, and they only depend on i. With that type of situation, separating the inside of the for loop like the following could allow multi-threaded operation which could lead to increased performance:

// Process this in one thread:
for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
    a = i * 2;
}

// Process this in another thread:
for (int i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
    b = i + 1;
}

However, what becomes tricky is if there needs to be a time when the results from the two separate threads need to be evaluated, such as seems to be implied by the if statement later on:

for (i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
  // manipulate "a" and "b"
  if (a == ...  || b == ...) { ... }
}

This would require that the a and b values which reside in separate threads (which are executing on separate processors) to be looked up, which is a serious headache.

There is no real good guarantee that the i values of the two threads are the same at the same time (after all, multiplication and addition probably will take different amount of times to execute), and that means that one thread may need to wait for another for the i values to get in sync before comparing the a and b that corresponds to the dependent value i. Or, do we make a third thread for value comparison and synchronization of the two threads? In either case, the complexity is starting to build up very quickly, so I think we can agree that we're starting to see a serious mess arising -- sharing states between threads can be very tricky.

Therefore, the code example you provide is only partially parallelizable without much effort, however, as soon as there is a need to compare the two variables, separating the two operations becomes very difficult very quickly.

Couple of rules of thumbs when it comes to concurrent programming:

When there are tasks which can be broken down into parts which involve processing of data that is completely independent of other data and its results (states), then parallelizing can be very easy.

For example, two functions which calculates a value from an input (in pseudocode):

f(x) = { return 2x }
g(x) = { return x+1 }

These two functions don't rely on each other, so they can be executed in parallel without any pain. Also, as they are no states to share or handle between calculations, even if there were multiple values of x that needed to be calculated, even those can be split up further:

x = [1, 2, 3, 4]
foreach t in x:
    runInThread(f(t))
foreach t in x:
    runInThread(g(t))

Now, in this example, we can have 8 separate threads performing calculations. Not having side effects can be very good thing for concurrent programming.

However, as soon as there is dependency on data and results from other calculations (which also means there are side effects), parallelization becomes extremely difficult. In many cases, these types of problems will have to be performed in serial as they await results from other calculations to be returned.

Perhaps the question comes down to, why can't compilers figure out parts that can be automatically parallelized and perform those optimizations? I'm not an expert on compilers so I can't say, but there is an article on automatic parallization at Wikipedia which may have some information.

Answer 8

With C/C++ you can use OpenMP. It's C code with pragmas like

#pragma omp parallel for
for(..) {
...
}

to say that this for will run in parallel. This is one easy way to parallelize something, but at some time you will have to understand how parallel programs execute and will be exposed to parallel programming bugs.

Answer 9

If you want to parallel the choice of the "i"s that evaluate to "true" your statement if (a == ... || b == ...) then you can do this with PLINQ (in .NET 4.0):

        //note the "AsParallel"; that's it, multicore support.
        var query = from i in Enumerable.Range(0, 100000000).AsParallel()
                    where (i % 2 == 1 && i >= 10) //your condition
                    select i;

        //while iterating, the query is evaluated in parallel! 
        //Result will probably never be in order (eg. 13, 11, 17, 15, 19..)
        foreach (var selected in query)
        {
            //not parallel here!
        }

If, instead, you want to parallelize operations, you will be able to do:

Parallel.For(0, 100000000, i =>
{
    if (i > 10)           //your condition here
        DoWork(i);        //Thread-safe operation
});

Answer 10

I know Intel chips very well.

Per your code, "if (a == ... || b == ...)" is a barrier, otherwise the processor cores will execute all code parallelly, regardless of compiler had done what kind of optimization. That only requires that the compiler is not a very "stupid" one. It means that the hardware has the capability itself, not software. So threaded programming or OpenMP is not necessary in such cases though they will help on improving parallel computing. Note here doesn't mean Hyper-threading, just normal multi-core processor functionalities.

Please google "processor pipeline multi port parallel" to learn more.

Here I'd like to give a classical example which could be executed by multi-core/multi-channel IMC platforms (e.g. Intel Nehalem family such as Core i7) parallelly, no extra software optimization would be needed.

char buffer0[64];
char buffer1[64];
char buffer2[64];
char buffer[192];

int i;
for (i = 0; i < 64; i++) {
    *(buffer + i) = *(buffer0 + i);
    *(buffer + 64 + i) = *(buffer1 + i);
    *(buffer + 128 + i) = *(buffer2 + i);
}

Why? 3 reasons.

1 Core i7 has a triple-channel IMC, its bus width is 192 bits, 64 bits per channel; and memory address space is interleaved among the channels on a per cache-line basis. cache-line length is 64 bytes. so basicly buffer0 is on channel 0, buffer1 will be on channel and buffer2 on channel 2; while for buffer[192], it was interleaved among 3 channels evently, 64 per channel. The IMC supports loading or storing data from or to multiple channels concurrently. That's multi-channel MC burst w/ maximum throughput. While in my following description, I'll only say 64 bytes per channel, say w/ BL x8 (Burst Length 8, 8 x 8 = 64 bytes = cache-line) per channel.

2 buffer0..2 and buffer are continuous in the memory space (on a specific page both virtually and physically, stack memroy). when run, buffer0, 1, 2 and buffer are loaded/fetched into the processor cache, 6 cache-lines in total. so after start the execution of above "for(){}" code, accessing memory is not necessary at all because all data are in the cache, L3 cache, a non-core part, which is shared by all cores. We'll not talk about L1/2 here. In this case every core could pick the data up and then compute them independently, the only requirement is that the OS supports MP and stealing task is allowed, say runtime scheduling and affinities sharing.

3 there're no any dependencies among buffer0, 1, 2 and buffer, so there're no execution stall or barriers. e.g. execute *(buffer + 64 + i) = *(buffer1 + i) doesn't need to wait the execution of *(buffer + i) = *(buffer0 + i) for done.

Though, the most important and difficult point is "stealing task, runtime scheduling and affinities sharing", that's because for a give task, there's only one task exection context and it should be shared by all cores to perform parallel execution. Anyone if could understand this point, s/he is among the top experts in the world. I'm looking for such an expert to cowork on my open source project and be responsible for parallel computing and latest HPC architectures related works.

Note in above example code, you also could use some SIMD instructions such as movntdq/a which will bypass processor cache and write memory directly. It's a very good idea too when perform software level optimization, though accessing memory is extremely expensive, for example, accessing cache (L1) may need just only 1 cycle, but accessing memory needs 142 cycles on former x86 chips.

Please visit http://effocore.googlecode.com and http://effogpled.googlecode.com to know the details.