cats wrote:One fun thing me and Lundis used to "battle" in (maybe you too? I don't remember everyone who did it) was who could write the fastest word generator.
Basically a generator that creates all the words from length 1 - X with char set a-zA-Z0-9 as fast as possible.
Interesting suggestion, I could do that for fun if anything. But for the project I'd like it to be a little more complex, a scenario where I could use locks etc.
floodhound2 wrote:Am I wrong to assume (and this is perhaps off topic) that parallel processing is great but the answer is always serial?
Complex parallel processing of matrices can be done with hundreds of answers or scenarios as the result, so is it really beneficial or better?
I suppose if you had a thousand logic statements that resulted in a 1 or 0 then perhaps so, but someplace in the code the paralleling had to wait for some other process making it not a true parallel process.
You're right, most of the time the program is serial, but it's not always the case. A simple example would be adding up all the elements of N arrays with N threads, but usually there's more to it and the next thread needs to wait for those N threads to finish their calculations in order to use the results.
The part that's waited for is called
critical section. But parallel processing is usually beneficial if you have a lot of instruction. The benefit is calculated with
Amdahl's law.
