On 12/27/2010 12:54 PM, Richard Hennessy wrote:
> Is Macsyma multi-threaded?
Macsyma (the commercial one?), is implemented on Windows on a
non-multi-threaded lisp, so: No.
> Are there any plans to make Maxima multi-threaded?
It would require an underlying lisp that supports multiprocessing, for a
start. Not all host lisps
support multiple threads. (Do any?)
> I have asked this second question before and got a negative response.
If someone is considering this, he/she should speak up. Otherwise,
probably not.
> Still, I think it is important, Maxima never uses more than 13% of my
> CPU capacity on my Intel I7 PC.
Probably waiting for memory.
> The Intel I7 has seven cores (using hyper-threading, I think).
> Maxima could be as much as 3 ? 5 times faster if it used all of them
> (my estimate based on testing of multi-threaded programs I have
> written), depending on the application.
Not if it is waiting for memory.
There are a number of basic algorithms that could be made faster, e.g.
polynomial multiplication in
the rational function representation, if memory bandwidth were not an issue.
It may be possible to call library routines (written with threads in
mind) to do stuff faster,
e.g. bignum arithmetic using GMP.
I would be surprised if any obvious opportunities for parallelism sped
up the test suite.
RJF