[PPL-devel] Thread Safety

[Gianluca Amato]

On 21/09/2016 11:28, Enea Zaffanella wrote:
>
> Hello.
>
> In the past weeks I worked on the inclusion of experimental 
> thread-safety support (mostly based on the work by Maxim Gaina) in the 
> "devel" branch of the Parma Polyhedra Library.
>
> A few relevant information:
>
> - as said above, thread-safety support is only available in the git 
> branch named "devel"
>
> - in order to enable support for thread-safety, the library has to be 
> configured using option "--enable-thread-safe"
>
> - it assumes a compiler supporting C++11 threads (tested only with gcc 
> on linux)
>
> - currently thread-safety is only available when using the C++, C and 
> Java language interfaces
>
> - the timeout mechanism does NOT support thread safety (yet)
>
> - a few examples of computations using multiple PPL threads can be 
> found in:
>       * demos/ppl_lcdd (for the C++ interface)
>       * demos/ppl_lpsol (for the C interface)
>       * interfaces/Java/tests/Variable_Output_thread_safe1.java
>
> - it is worth stressing (again) that the library is *conditionally* 
> thread safe: if any two application threads share library objects, the 
> application should manage to properly serialize all accesses to these 
> objects (note: even when all these accesses are meant to be read-only, 
> because many PPL operators are "logically const", but may actually 
> modify the internal representation of objects, therefore leading to 
> race conditions)
>
> - beware of inefficiencies coming from memory allocation; we suggest 
> to replace the standard allocation mechanism with something that 
> behaves better in a multi-threaded setting (e.g., TCMalloc).
>
> It would be nice if people interested in this extension could give it 
> a try and provide us with some feedback.
>
> Enea.
I am quite interested. I hope to make some experiments using the Java 
interface as soon as possible.

--gianluca amato