[PD] parallelism in pd

[Miller Puckette]

I concur, with a slight spin: Pd is often memory-bound, and most
dual-processor systems, especially Intel based ones but also AMD,
have their speed limited by memory bandwidth (which is shared between
processors.)

If you want to try it anyway, check out Jmax, which they (IRCAM) claim
knows how to distribute DSP across processors.

cheers
Miller

On Tue, Apr 16, 2002 at 12:43:07PM -0400, Karl MacMillan wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-04-16 at 11:34, Andrew (Andy) W. Schmeder wrote:
> > Hi all.
> > 
> > I'd like to know how PD uses parallelism to take advantage of SMP
> > systems... i.e. does it use threads to dispatch the work across multiple
> > CPUs?
> > 
> 
> Not exactly - though the GUI is in a separate process and some of the
> objects use threads (readsf~). Be aware that there is really no reason
> to use threads until your cpu usage is at 100 percent. The computational
> need of the patches is normally constrained by the availability of data
> from the soundcard. In other words, you can't process audio you don't
> have yet, so if - for example - you use 25 percent of two cpus you are
> simply spending longer waiting for audio data.
> 
> Karl
> 
> > -andy
> -- 
> ---------------------
> Karl W. MacMillan                                 
> Computer Music Department                        
> Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University
> karlmac at peabody.jhu.edu                         
> mambo.peabody.jhu.edu/~karlmac                 
>