Dr. Dobb's is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.


Channels ▼
RSS

Parallel

How Much Scalability Do You Have or Need?


O(N): Scalable Throughput And the Free Lunch

The key to scalable throughput is to express lots of latent concurrency that isn't explicitly coded in the program and that scales to match its inputs (number of messages, size of data, and so on) and that can be efficiently mapped down at execution time to the variable number N cores available on a given machine.

We find the scalable concurrency opportunities principally by exploiting natural parallelism:

  • Exploit parallelism in algorithm structures: For example, recursive sorting can exploit the natural parallelism in its divide-and-conquer structure.
  • Exploit parallelism in data structures: For example, tree traversal can often exploit the independence in each node's subtrees. Compilation can exploit independence at several levels in the structure of source code, from coarse-grained independence among source files to finer-grained independence among classes or methods within a file.

This lets us decompose the application into a "sea of chores"—expressing independent chunks of work that are big or small, blocking or nonblocking, structured subdivisions or independent; but we often want to look first for the CPU-bound work—and rely on the runtime system to "rightsize" the application by assigning those chores efficiently to whatever hardware parallelism is available on a given user's system.

OpenMP supports some constrained O(N) styles, but it is primarily intended for use with integer-indexed loops over arrays and doesn't work well with iteration-based containers in STL, .NET, or Java. Instead, as mentioned in last month's column [2], today, one common idiom for expressing such a sea of work items is to explicitly schedule chores for execution on a thread pool (for example, using Java ThreadPoolExecutor or .NET BackgroundWorker). Unfortunately, this incurs significant context-switch overhead and so you have to ensure that a work item will be worth shipping over to a worker thread. In the future, this constraint will be relaxed as languages and runtimes improve.

O(N) is the key to re-enabling the free lunch and keeping lots of cores busy, because it lets us express applications that can run on yesterday's single-core machine, run better on today's four-core machine, run better still on tomorrow's 64-core machine, and so on until we exhaust the inherent limit of CPU-boundedness in the application. For a thread pool-driven program, on a single-core machine the system can spin up a single worker thread that runs the program by serially pulling chore after chore from the sea and executing it; on an eight-core machine, it can spin up eight threads; and so on [4].

As with O(K), O(N) can have costs at runtime on even a single-core machine. In addition to the costs mentioned for O(K), there can be extra work inherent in divide-and-conquer techniques (e.g., reductions such as piecing together a grand total from intermediate results), and the cost of locking shared data can now also increase. However, by applying concurrency, we can often get good scalability that far offsets the overhead.

Using O(N) is highly desirable for software that expects to run on a variety of current and future hardware having variable amounts of hardware parallelism—which happens to now be the target for all mainstream desktop and server software. If your application doesn't currently have key CPU-bound operations that are amenable to full O(N) parallelization, don't give up: Consider finding new desirable features that are amenable to O(N), or at least more O(K), and you will still be able to deliver software that runs well on today's hardware, better on tomorrow's hardware, and better still on future systems.

Notes

[1] I use "cores" as a simple shorthand measure of execution hardware parallelism. For applications running on one local machine the appropriate measure is usually "total hardware threads," meaning #sockets× #cores/socket×#threads/core; and for distributed applications the appropriate measure is usually "nodes."

[2] H. Sutter. "The Pillars of Concurrency" (DDJ, 32(7), August 2007, http://ddj.com/dept/64bit/200001985).

[3] H. Sutter. "The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software" (DDJ, 30(3), March 2005, http://ddj.com/dept/webservices/184405990).

[4] The details are more complex. For example, a pool should spin up extra worker threads to keep the system busy whenever one chore blocks to wait for some event and so temporarily idles its worker thread.


Herb is a software architect at Microsoft and chair of the ISO C++ Standards committee. He can be contacted at www.gotw.ca.


Related Reading


More Insights






Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.