[sldev] Multi-multi-core (again)

[Laurent Laborde]

Hi,
it is not directly about the secondlife development, but i'd like to
know the thing i'll describe below isn't/can't be implemented in
SecondLife.

I'm developping a tiny game engine that will do very heavy
computational tasks because it will be based in Fluid Dynamic and Soft
Body Physics.
I noticed that, in a game, a lot of stuff could be parallelized :
doing exactly the same task with different dataset (e.g : texture
loading/decoding).

rule #1 : one task, one thread
rule #2 : if there is more thread than available core, push the tread
in a pool and wait for an available core.
rule #3 : re-use the thread as mush as possible to avoid the cost of
creating/destroying the thread.

The most obvious usage in SL, following that rule, is j2k decoding of
course. So SL take advantage of octo... hexa-core CPU ... or card like
NVidia Tesla (256 core.. and more more more to come), future-proof.
Of course we don't know what result we'll get first, it's totally
asyncrochronus, but for this kind of task... we just don't care...
right ? As we don't know what texture will be downloaded first anyway
we don't really need to know what texture will be decoded first too.

What do you think about that ?
Thx :)

-- 
kerunix Flan