[chuck-users] cheap parallel ChucKing

[Rogan Carr]

Hi Graham,

The only drawback that I can see is that the OS will need to use one
of the cores from time to time, so you shouldn't be able to max out
both 100% of the time.  But if you're not doing much communication
with the outside world other than through your soundcard, you
shouldn't really see a performance hit, I don't think.  I've seen in
some multicore supercomputers that you can only run on like 7 of 8
cores per node, because you need the last core to manage system calls
and inter-node communications.  That said, I don't think that there's
such a heavy demand on communications on a two-core stand-alone box
that you would see an effect.

Here's a question I have -- if they are both based on the same system
clock, will the two instances of chuck stay in sync, time-wise?

Cheers,
Rogan

On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 5:39 AM, Graham Percival
<graham at percival-music.ca> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> We're using ChucK as a cheap synthesizer for a bunch of new
> electronic instruments.  To make best use of the dual-core CPU,
> we're launching ChucK in two separate threads:
>
> $ chuck first-server.ck &
> $ chuck second-server.ck
>
> This works great (it almost maxes out both cores on a mac mini),
> although the second instance of chuck complains that it can't bind
> to port 8888.
>
> Are there any potential pitfalls to this method?  I know that we
> can't (easily[1]) get any communication between these two chuck
> instances, but in this case we don't need it -- each instrument's
> synthesis is completely independant of the other one.  In CS
> terms, this problem is "embarrasingly parallel".  :)
>
>
> [1] we could add code to our OSC servers to send messages back and
> forth via loopback, which isn't precisely "hard", but it's not as
> easy as everything else we do in ChucK -- this language is
> awesome.  :)
>
> Cheers,
> - Graham Percival
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