Re: Sibelius Software UK office shuts down

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 6:53 PM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On 06/08/12 20:26, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
>>
>> Also, going MT will give you a max 8x speedup (assuming perfect
>> parallelization on an 8 core machine). That is not going to bring down
>> processing costs to interactive rates.
>
>
> I think you're focusing on the wrong kind of architecture.

I'm talking about the architecture of computers that people can buy in
the shops today. While cute, a 192-way ARM server is useless in
realistic scenarios. See eg.
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/pt-BR/us/pubs/archive/36448.pdf
- aka. "Let's use 9 pregnant women, we'd have a baby within the
month."

Unless you have a embarrassingly parallel problem to begin with (which
music typesetting is not), lots of parallelism only buys you
synchronization overhead, both lock contention at run-time, and the
overhead of having to write race-condition-free parallel code.

Note that lilypond is embarassingly parallel at the file level, so for
the regression test, we already distribute the files on as many CPUs
as we have available.

> _This_ is the kind of setup that you should be aiming to exploit the
> multithreaded possibilities of:
> http://www.zdnet.com/boston-virdis-192-core-server-consumes-only-300-watts-of-datacenter-power-7000001654/

-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen