Follow-up to The Bible In A Year: Days 13 & 14 (January 13th & 14th) from The Utovsky Bolshevik Show
The reading for January 15th is Genesis 36-38 and Romans 12. I’ve left this late once again, so haven’t made any notes.
16 Sep 2007 00:18
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Tags: Bible Christian Genesis Reading Romans
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Writing about web page http://blog.reindel.com/2007/09/13/i-will-never-support-the-semantic-web/
Through the programming reddit I found Brian Reindel’s post about the Semantic Web. The very first comment on this is James Simmons’ letting Brian know that he had written a blog post in response. Brian then responded in James’ comments.
I’m not hugely interested in the Semantic Web, but it’s a refreshing change to see a reasoned debate about an issue, as opposed to the mud slinging matches that are often found online.
15 Sep 2007 23:19
| Tags: Blogging Computer Online Semantic Web
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Follow-up to The Bible In A Year: Day 12 (January 12th) from The Utovsky Bolshevik Show
I’ve caught up on yesterdays reading and done todays but not taken notes.
The reading for January 12th was Genesis 31-32 and Romans 11:1-18. The reading for January 13th was Genesis 33-35 and Romans 11:19-36.
14 Sep 2007 23:04
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Follow-up to Benchmarking Parallel Python Against Jython Threading (Benchmarks Take 3) from The Utovsky Bolshevik Show
Having claimed in a previous post that Parallel Python's ability to use the processing power of more than a single machine would work in its favour even when compared to the times for Jython threading, I thought I should probably look at some results to see if this is the case.
As previously, the benchmark being used is to sum all the primes beneath each multiple of 10000 between 100000 and 1000000. The code examples can be found at http://oddbloke.uwcs.co.uk/parallel_benchmarks/
The Jython script uses Tim Lesher's cookbook recipe for a thread pool. The Parallel Python script uses a slightly tweaked version of one of the examples on the Parallel Python site.
The two machines over which this is being tested are the University of Warwick Computing Society's servers, Backus and Codd, with Codd being used as the master server. Both these machines have two CPUs.
The setup for the slave machine really is as easy as:
$ ./ppserver.py -p 35000 -w 2
Once this was set up, I proceeded to test the Jython and Parallel Python scripts. Disappointingly, the Jython script used more memory than I have available on my ulimit'ed account when running more than a single thread. I have approximated based on the previous results I've had.
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Looking solely at the numbers for Parallel Python, it seems that the speedup gained by using a second machine is significant. It should be noted that Parallel Python's default regardless of whether or not it had the second machine available was 2 workers, so the automatic detection code is obviously sub-optimal. It's trivial to override, so this wasn't a problem.
When this is compared to Jython's threading, it doesn't look significant but when we consider Jython's arithmetic ability and the fact that Parallel Python can continue to scale beyond this, Parallel Python begins to look better and better. It should also be noted that, unsurprisingly, Jython uses a considerable amount more memory than CPython does.
EDIT: As pointed out in the comments, Jesse Noller has also started looking into benchmarking this sort of stuff.
14 Sep 2007 00:36
| Tags: Computer Free Multiprocessor Parallel Python Software
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Follow-up to The Bible In A Year: Day 11 (January 11th) from The Utovsky Bolshevik Show
This reading is delayed because I got up late yesterday, met a friend for coffee and then went over to a different friend’s to stay the night.
The reading for January 11th is Genesis 29-30 and Romans 10. Today’s reading proper will, as ever, follow later.
13 Sep 2007 14:15
| Tags: Bible Christian Genesis Reading Romans
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Follow-up to Benchmarking Parallel Python Against Threading from The Utovsky Bolshevik Show
Having had it pointed out to me that benchmarking against CPython threading is pointless, I am now going to do what I should have done originally (third time's the charm, right?) and benchmark Parallel CPython against threaded Java, in the hopes I will fail less at producing something useful.
Each of these results is the time it takes to sum the prime numbers below each multiple of 10000 between 100000 and 1000000 (i.e. perform the operation 90 times on numbers increasing by 10000 each time).
I'm reusing the Parallel Python results from previously.
I decided to use Tim Lesher's cookbook recipe to test threads, as I already have a script which doesn't require a great deal of rewriting to make it Jython (i.e. CPython 2.2 or so) compatible.
Now, the results:
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As can be seen here, Jython threads by far and away beat Parallel CPython. This does not, however, take into account the fact that Parallel Python can use several machines at once, which Jython threading obviously cannot do.
What's interesting to note is that Parallel CPython on one worker is roughly the same as standard GIL'd CPython (slightly faster, in fact, in this case). If you need to write and deploy CPython as opposed to Jython, then there's no performance cost in writing parallelisable code to use Parallel Python regardless of end user (as PP, by default, spawns a number of workers equal to the available CPUs).
These statistics were taken on an IBM Thinkpad T60 with a Core Duo T2400 running Ubuntu Feisty GNU/Linux (using the standard packages where available) using the scripts found under http://oddbloke.uwcs.co.uk/parallel_benchmarks/ .
Hopefully these are useful statistics and conclusions, as opposed to my previous efforts to produce such. :)
11 Sep 2007 23:55
| Tags: Computer Free Multiprocessor Parallel Python Software
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Follow-up to Benchmarking Parallel Python from The Utovsky Bolshevik Show
Having had it pointed out to me that my last benchmarking post is fairly useless without a comparison to threading by a couple of people, I now have such a comparison. The numbers for PP are those used in the last blog post.
For threads I initially tried using Christopher Arndt's threadpool module to make my life easier. I've included these results in the table below and, looking at them, you can see why I thought had to find a different way of testing threads.
I decided to use Tim Lesher's cookbook recipe to retest threads.
The function used by all the methods is identical, so this should just be a measure of their performance.
Without further ado, the results:
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Obviously these results don't reflect brilliantly on threads. What I did notice is that it was only Parallel Python that used more than 1 of my processors, which I presume is something GIL related.
Either Parallel Python is an excellent improvement over threads, or I'm doing something stupid regarding threads. If the latter, please let me know and I'll run the benchmarks again.
11 Sep 2007 21:47
| Tags: Computer Free Multiprocessor Parallel Python Software
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Follow-up to The Bible In A Year: Day 10 (January 10th) from The Utovsky Bolshevik Show
The reading for January 11th is Genesis 27-28 and Romans 9:16-33.
To get you up to speed, Abraham has died and been buried with his wife, Sarah. Isaac and Rebekah have had male twins, Jacob and Esau. Esau, the elder, has sold his birthright to Jacob in exchange for some food. The birthright includes God’s promise to Abraham.
In this passage, Jacob steals Esau’s ‘blessing’ from him by fooling a now blind Isaac into bestowing it upon him. The ‘blessing’ was an actual binding legal statement at the time, so Jacob has now stolen both Esau’s birthright and his blessing. As such, he will be the master of Isaac’s tribe, Esau included. Esau is, unsurprisingly, none too pleased about this. Rebekah tells Jacob to run away and tells Isaac that she doesn’t want him to marry a non-Israelite.
1 So Isaac called for Jacob and blessed him and commanded him: “Do not marry a Canaanite woman.
Despite the trick Jacob has played on Isaac, Isaac will still bless him.
20 Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me and will watch over me on this journey I am taking and will give me food to eat and clothes to wear 21 so that I return safely to my father’s house, then the LORD will be my God 22 and this stone that I have set up as a pillar will be God’s house, and of all that you give me I will give you a tenth.”
Jacob finally stops referring to God as his father’s God (having just had God’s promise re-iterated to him). Also another instance of tithing.
18 Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.
19 One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will?”
If God has already decided who will be saved and who will not, how can He blame those who will not be saved?
20 But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’ ” 21 Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use?
Paul answers, somewhat unsatisfactorily, that we are God’s to do with as He will.
22 What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction? 23 What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory— 24 even us, whom he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles?
Paul, however, goes on to say that God is a merciful God and so we should trust in what he is doing, even if it doesn’t make a great deal of sense to us.
11 Sep 2007 16:58
| Tags: Bible Christian Genesis Reading Romans
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Writing about web page http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=214303
This post is Bruce Eckel’s follow-up to his previous post which covered, among other things, concurrency within Python. Basically, CPython has the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) which makes life very awkward for those wanting to run Python on more than one processor.
Anyhow, in this post Bruce points to Parallel Python as an add-on module which is a potential solution. I had a look at this and thought it was pretty cool. However, bearing in mind Guido van Rossum’s post about the performance implications of removing the GIL last time it was attempted I thought I’d see if this actually did provide a speed-up and benchmark it.
The following stats are for calculating the sum of primes below every multiple of 10000 between 105 and 106 (including the lower bound and excluding the upper). The first set uses only one working thread0 of my Core Duo laptop and the second set uses two (as I have two processors).
It should be noted that the code snippet being used is provided as an example on the Parallel Python website and so is probably one of their most optimal cases. Regardless, I think the numbers are helpful.
Real Time Taken: 1153.53128409 s
Number of jobs: 90
Total Job Time: 1153.53128409 s
Time/Job: 12.816742
Real Time Taken: 601.201694012 s
Number of jobs: 90
Total Job Time: 1180.9738
Time/Job: 13.121931
It can be seen that running two worker threads increases the actual CPU time used by around 30 seconds but the fact that two processors are being used leads to a total speed up factor of 1.918709304, which is pretty impressive.
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0 I’m not sure of the internals, so I don’t know if it is technically a thread. Regardless, only one calculation will happen at a time.
11 Sep 2007 16:18
| Tags: Computer Free Multiprocessor Parallel Python Software
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Follow-up to The Bible In A Year: Day 9 (January 9th) from The Utovsky Bolshevik Show
Once again, I fail to read on time. I don’t even have the excuse of sleeping patterns this time, I was up a normal amount. Just lazy.
The reading for January 10th is Genesis 25-26 and Romans 9:1-15. As ever, today’s reading proper will follow later.
11 Sep 2007 13:38
| Tags: Bible Christian Genesis Reading Romans
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