Re: [boost] [futures] boost::futures

From: Marcus Lindblom (macke_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-03-10 10:18:09

Peter Dimov wrote:
>
> As an aside, does anyone have a success story about active objects? I can't 
> seem to grasp their significance; in particular, how are they supposed to 
> scale to many cores/HW threads if every access is implicitly serialized? 

I don't know if this applies directly, but I've recently looked at 
Intel's Thread Building Blocks  and I must say I'm quite impressed how 
they've handled things. (It's free to download for evaluation, see 
http://www.intel.com/software/products/tbb/)

Their library is solely aimed at parallellizing cpu-limited algorithms 
to many cores, by means of a task scheduler and some nifty 
breath-first/depth-first evaluation schemes.

It's different from the concept of an 'active object' which may reside 
on different threades/processes/cpus/machines/planets, but I think it 
could be one direction to think of in terms of futures and how they 
spawn recursively to create job objects that are handled by a 
thread-pool (typically one thread per core).

The two problems are a bit different, but I just thought I should 
mention it here as I liked it a lot and I think a boost-ish 
implementation of something similar would be of great value to the world.

Cheers,
/Marcus