[Bf-committers] Curious about 'SetThreadGroupAffinity()'

[John Emmas]

Great explanation, Brecht - thanks !

John

On 28/05/2018 12:40, Brecht Van Lommel wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We use SetThreadGroupAffinity() for systems with more than 64 cores,
> without that it doesn't use all the cores.
>
> SetThreadAffinityMask() is a hint to the operating system scheduler, which
> can improve performance by some % due to fewer context switches or better
> memory location for example. If you have just a single process with a
> single thread pool with the same amount of threads and cores a hint can
> help.
>
> But if you have multiple processes, multiple thread pools, external
> renderers doing their own threading, ... then the optimal scheduling is not
> so obvious and giving the wrong hints can cause higher priority tasks to be
> slowed. Adding affinity may still help, but it would need detailed
> benchmarking, and even then it's a bit risky because it might be worse in
> some corner cases we didn't predict. Generally the operating system
> scheduler does a good job, and these schedulers have gotten better in newer
> operating systems too.
>
> Regards,
> Brecht.
>
>
>
> On Mon, May 28, 2018 at 12:15 PM, John Emmas <john at creativepost.co.uk>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi guys - forgive me asking a trivial question.  It's just something I
>> noticed in the Blender code...
>>
>> I'm involved mostly in audio products where we often use multiple threads
>> to run things like the processing stuff (plugins etc).  On Windows we'll
>> call functions like 'SetThreadAffinityMask()' or
>> 'SetThreadIdealProcessor()' to ensure that multiple threads get run on
>> different CPU cores which gives an element of parallel processing (assuming
>> there's enough cores available).
>>
>> But looking through the Blender code it seems like you've chosen a
>> different approach ('SetThreadGroupAffinity()').  I might be
>> misunderstanding something but AFAICT that'll assign threads to a processor
>> group (rather than any individual processor).  So it won't necessarily
>> promote parallel processing.  Or isn't that the reason?  Do you use that
>> approach because it offers some other benefit?  Like I said, I'm just
>> curious really...
>>
>> John
>> _______________________________________________
>> Bf-committers mailing list
>> Bf-committers at blender.org
>> https://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-committers mailing list
> Bf-committers at blender.org
> https://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
>