[racket] Racket and concurrency

I forgot to reply to the list.

On 07/03/2012 10:33 AM, Harry Spier wrote:
> I'm starting to look at Racket concurrency functions (futures and
> places) to increase the efficiency of my application and I have a few
> questions.  Its an OCR application so that once I've segmented the
> text and created a data-structure to describe the text, the processing
> can be done concurrently at either higher or lower levels.  I.e. I can
> process pages of a book concurrently, or I can process the pages
> sequentially and process lines on a page concurrently or again I can
> process lines sequentially but process letters concurrently.
>
> So my questions are:
> 1) Since there is no communication between my concurrent processes
> other than combining the results does it make more sense to use places
> rather than futures.
I'd recommend places.  You need to make sure you think about
about the ratio of communication to computation. i.e
time to communicate a page of graphical data vs time to OCR a page of 
data in the destination place.

>
> 2) Is it better to do the concurrency at the highest level possible or
> at the lowest level possible. I.e. should I be processing pages
> concurrently or should I go to a much lower level and only be
> processing letters concurrently.  Does it matter?
Using places I would process pages or group of pages concurrently.
>
> 3)  How does hyperthreading affect the number of places or futures I
> can run concurrently? For example if I have an i7 with 4 cores and
> hyperthreading, will that run 4 or 8 places concurrently?
(processor-count) will return 8 in this case.
You can choose to launch (processor-count) places or (/ 
(processor-count) 2) places.
>
> 4) Are there any "gotcha's" I need to look out for?
Data sent to places has to be serialized.
>
> Thanks,

Kevin
> Harry
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