On Sunday 27 December 2009 20:56:51 you wrote:
Jon Harrop wrote:
This is something that concerns me. Lots of discussions of parallelism, including the Haskell literature I have read, neglect this critical problem of making sure that more time is spent doing useful work than spawning tasks (sparks). How is this solved in Haskell? Do you just put magic numbers in that work on the machine you're currently using?
It is simply not true that Haskell literature neglects the question of spark granularity - this is very basic and is always covered. Read "Real World Haskell" (available free online). There's no 'magic number'. You must explicitly write your code to give the right granule size.
There is no "right granule" size. That's the whole point: the optimum is a function of the machine. If you hardcode the granularity then your code isn't future proof and isn't portable. From chapter 24 of Real World Haskell on sorting: "At this fine granularity, the cost of using par outweighs any possible usefulness. To reduce this effect, we switch to our non-parallel sort after passing some threshold." From the Sorting.hs file, parSort2 accepts a threshold "d": parSort2 :: (Ord a) => Int -> [a] -> [a] parSort2 d list@(x:xs) | d <= 0 = sort list | otherwise = force greater `par` (force lesser `pseq` (lesser ++ x:greater)) where lesser = parSort2 d' [y | y <- xs, y < x] greater = parSort2 d' [y | y <- xs, y >= x] d' = d - 1 parSort2 _ _ = [] From the SortMain.hs file, it is always invoked with the magic number "2": testFunction = parSort2 2 Moreover, their approach of subdividing a fixed number of times is suboptimal because it inhibits load balancing. Later, about parallelized IO, they give the code: chunkedReadWith :: (NFData a) => ([LB.ByteString] -> a) -> FilePath -> IO a chunkedReadWith func path = withChunks (lineChunks (numCapabilities * 4)) func path where "4" is one magic number that gets multiplied by the magic number the user supplied via the +RTS -N<n> command-line option. They make no attempt to adapt the granularity to the machine at all and rely entirely upon magic numbers. Consequently, their parallel sort that got a 25% speedup on two cores achieves a 30% slowdown on my 8 core.
I don't know the exact cost of sparking, but in my experience it is quite small - so - as long as your granule is doing *some* real work, it should speed up.
Can you quantify it, e.g. How many FLOPS?
Jon Harrop wrote:
The parallelism is obviously not obtaining any real speedup so something is wrong. But can anyone fix it?
I've spent a bit of time measuring parallel speedup on real commercial projects, and this is what I've found:
1. ghc-6.12 performs significantly better than ghc-6.10, and has now been released, therefore don't use ghc-6.10.
Ok.
2. The defaults generally work better than giving huge heap sizes. Your -K100000000 - maximum heap size per thread - will either do nothing or cause an artificial slowdown (I have observed this with the minimum heap size option). Don't use it, unless experimentation proves it makes things better.
On the contrary, the Haskell program dies without it: $ time ./mergesort +RTS -N8 Stack space overflow: current size 8388608 bytes. Use `+RTS -Ksize' to increase it. [1]+ Done kwrite mergesort.hs real 0m33.320s user 3m29.397s sys 0m0.592s I had to add that -K command line option just to get the program to run to completion.
3. +RTS -s is well worth using. It breaks the time down into MUT (mutator) and GC (garbage collector).
Its says 78.5% GC time (with GHC 6.10).
4. MUT parallelization is excellent, but the parallel GC is not so good. If your code is GC-heavy it can spend around half of its time garbage collecting, which doesn't parallelize so well, and this eats into the speedup.
Ok.
5. There seems to be a scalability problem with the parallel gc for larger numbers of cores (namely 8). I am guessing somewhat, but my experiments tend to confirm the issue raised in Simon Marlow's (the implementor of GHC parallelization) recent paper that it's to do with "stopping the world" for gc.
Do you mean this bug: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3553
If GHC's lack of perfection at this point in time makes Haskell "look bad" I don't mind. I am not selling anything, so the reader at least knows they're getting the truth. I see this as one of the great advantages of open source.
I'm sure we'd all rather see speedups. :-)
Progress on GHC has been very rapid in the last couple of years, and so I know we'll continue to see the speed of GHC's parallelism improving in leaps and bounds. It's actually still quite a new area, considering the difficulty of some of the technical issues and how recent it is that multicores are widely available on consumer hardware.
My original intent was to test a claim someone made: that mergesort in Haskell is competitively performant and trivially parallelized.
I know you OCaml/F# guys are making great progress too.
F# is production ready but OCaml is dead in the water when it comes to multicore. I'm working on an OCaml replacement called HLVM but it is early days yet. -- Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e