How to ensure that std::thread are created in multi core?

Question

I am using visual studio 2012. I have a module, where, I have to read a huge set of files from the hard disk after traversing their corresponding paths through an xml. For this i am doing

std::vector<std::thread> m_ThreadList;

In a while loop I am pushing back a new thread into this vector, something like

m_ThreadList.push_back(std::thread(&MyClass::Readfile, &MyClassObject, filepath,std::ref(polygon)));

My C++11 multi threading knowledge is limited.The question that I have here , is , how do create a thread on a specific core ? I know of parallel_for and parallel_for_each in vs2012, that make optimum use of the cores. But, is there a way to do this using standard C++11?

Answer 1

As pointed out in other comments, you cannot create a thread "on a specific core", as C++ has no knowledge of such architectural details. Moreover, in the majority of cases, the operating system will be able to manage the distribution of threads among cores/processors well enough.

That said, there exist cases in which forcing a specific distribution of threads among cores can be beneficial for performance. As an example, by forcing a thread to execute onto a one specific core it might be possible to minimise data movement between different processor caches (which can be critical for performance in certain memory-bound scenarios).

If you want to go down this road, you will have to look into platform-specific routines. E.g., for GNU/linux with POSIX threads you will want pthread_setaffinity_np(), in FreeBSD cpuset_setaffinity(), in Windows SetThreadAffinityMask(), etc.

I have some relevant code snippets here if you are interested:

http://gitorious.org/piranhapp0x/mainline/blobs/master/src/thread_management.cpp

Answer 2

I'm fairly certain that core affinity isn't included in std::thread. The assumption is that the OS is perfectly capable of making best possible use of the cores available. In all but the most extreme of cases you're not to going to beat the OS's decision, so the assumption is a fair one.

If you do go down that route then you have to add some decision making to your code to take account of machine architecture to ensure that your decision is better than the OSes on every machine you run on. That takes a lot of effort! For starters you'll be wanting to limit the number of threads to match the number of cores on the computer. And you don't have any knowledge of what else is going on in the machine; the OS does!

Which is why thread pools exist. They tend by default to have as many threads as there are cores, automatically set up by the language runtime. AFAIK C++11 doesn't have one of those. So the one good thing you can do to get the optimum performance is to find out how many cores there are and limit the number of threads you have to that number. Otherwise it's probably just best to trust the OS.

Joachim Pileborg's comment is well worth paying attention to, unless the work done by each thread outweighs the I/O overhead.