[PD] future directions for threading in Pd (Was: Re: puredata evolution)

[Claude Heiland-Allen]

Phil Stone wrote:
> This has been a fascinating thread about the direction of PD.
> 
> I've been thinking about parallelism and PD as multi-core processors 
> become common.  How hard would it be to make PD able to take advantage 
> of parallel architecture?  I'm guessing that it is decidedly 
> non-trivial, as lack of threading is already an issue in contention 
> between the GUI and audio processing.
> 
> Without some support for parallelism, PD could be going as fast as it 
> will ever go -- the trend seems to be that CPU speeds will not be 
> climbing much (at least not dramatically like they have until now), and 
> increasing numbers of cores will be the path to greater speed and power. 
> 
> Is there any hope in this direction?
> 
> 
> Phil Stone

I had a discussion with matju in #dataflow [1] last week about possible 
directions for multithreading in Pd.  The general conclusions we reached 
were roughly:

1. threading/parallelism is necessary, and will become more necessary

2. trying to automatically split the computational load between multiple 
threads will be very difficult and the result sub-optimal

3. solution: a primitive in Pd for manually controlled threading

4. the existing threading externals are error prone, because you need 
object delimiters at all boundaries of the non-specific region to be 
threaded, otherwise horrible crashes can result

5. methods already exist in Pd for defining specific regions, namely 
abstractions and subpatches

6. there are already objects that change the properties of those 
specific regions, namely [block~] and [switch~]

7. a similar object could be created to make a specific region a 
separate thread, which would change the behaviour of [inlet] [outlet] 
etc to communicate between threads, much like [block~] changes the 
behaviour of [inlet~] etc to communicate between different signal vector 
block sizes.

8. arguments and messages to the [thread] object (or however it is 
named) could adjust the thread priority, or other parameters.


Claude

[1] irc://irc.freenode.net/#dataflow

-- 
http://claudiusmaximus.goto10.org