Tag Archives: parallelism

Programming

Clojure Exchange 2013: Tommy Hall on Concurrency versus Parallelism

One of the really interesting talks at Clojure Exchange 2013 was one by Tommy Hall with the (not good) title You came for the concurrency, right?.

The talk had two main threads. It served as a helpful review of Clojure’s state-handling, concurrency and parallel processing features. Useful for beginners but also a helpful recap for the more experienced.

The other was a discussion of what we mean by concurrency and parallelism. Something that I hadn’t really thought about before (although I was aware there was a difference). Tommy referenced this talk Concurrency is not Parallelism (it’s better) by Rob Pike.

In the talk Rob gives the following definitions:

Concurrency: programming as the composition of independently executing processes

Parallelism: programming as the simultaneous execution of (possibly related) computations

In the talk Tommy gives the future function as an example of programming to indicate concurrency boundaries and the reducers library as an example of parallelism.

Rob’s presentation is worth reading in full but his conclusion is that concurrency is not a guarantee of parallel execution but that achieving parallelism without concurrency is very hard or impossible. Tommy’s talk uses an Erlang example to make the same point.

Don’t fear the monoid

While discussing reducers Tommy finally explained something that I struggled before. A lot of type champions point at reducers and shout Monoids! As if that was some kind of argument.

During his talk Tommy explains that parallel combination function needs to be able to return an identity so the function always returns a value and that because ordering of values is not guaranteed (unlike the implied order in a regular reduce)  it needs to be associative.

That makes sense. Turns out that those are also the properties of a monoid.

Fans of type systems throw terms like Monad, Dual and Monoid not to help add understanding to a discussion but to use them as shibboleths. It was far more enlightening to see an example of where the needs of a problem were driving to a category of function with certain properties. If that is common enough to deserve a shorthand-name, fair enough, but the name itself is not magical and knowing the various function category names is a feat of learning rather akin to memorising all those software pattern names from the Gang of Four’s book.

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Programming

Concurrency means performance, yes?

One thing I heard a lot at the Mostly Functional conference last week that concurrency is required for performance on multicore processors. Since Moore’s Law ended it is certainly true that the old trick of not writing performant code but letting hardware advances pick up the slack has been flagging (although things like SSD have still had their impact).

However equating concurrent code with performance is subtly wrong. If there was a direct relationship then we would have seen concurrent programming adopted swiftly by the games programmers. And yet there we still see an emphasis on ordered, predictable execution, cache structure and algorithmic efficiency.

Performance is one of those vague computing terms, like scale, that has many dimensions. Concurrency has no direct relation to performance as anyone who has managed to write a concurrent program with global resource contention can attest.

There are two relevant axes to considering performance and concurrency: throughput and capacity. Concurrency, through parallelism, allows you to greatly increase your utilisation of the available resources to provide a greater capacity for work.

However that work is not inherently performed faster and may actually result in lowered throughput due to the need to read data that is not in memory and the inability to predict the order of execution.

For things like webservices that are inherently stateless then often concurrency does massively increase performance because the capacity to serve request goes up and there is no need coordinate work. If the webservice is accessing a shared store where essentially all of the key data is in memory and what we need to do is read rather than mutate that data then concurrency becomes even more desirable.

On the other hand, if what we want to do is process work as quickly as possible, i.e. maximise throughput, then concurrency can be a very poor choice.

If we cannot predict the order that work will need to be executed in, due to things like having to distribute work across threads and retry work due to temporary errors then we may have to create the entire context for the work repeatedly and load it into local memory.

In circumstances like these concurrency hurts performance. After all the fastest processing is probably still pointer manipulation of a memory-mapped file, if your want to really fast.

So concurrency means performance and beating Moore’s Law if you can be stateless and value volume of processing over unit throughput.

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