C++ parallel program is very slow on windows (Threading)

Question

I am writing a program to run electrical simulations. Each simulation runs in series (no threading), so that the threading may be done to handle thousands of simulations.

I am testing the program on 3 machines:

Windows machine (Windows 10, Intel i7 4GHZ, 32 GB RAM) -> (MSVC + Intel MKL)
Linux machine (Ubuntu 20.04, Ryzen 5, 3.4 GHz, 24 GB RAM) -> (GCC + Intel MKL)
MacOS machine (MacBook Air, M1, 8GB RAM) -> (Clang + Apple Accelerate)

When compiling, the only difference between the platforms is that I need to link against different OS-specific implementations of BLAS and LAPACK

I have declared the following parallel for template function:

template
static void ParallelFor(Index start, Index end, Callable func) {
    // Estimate number of threads in the pool
    const static unsigned nb_threads_hint = std::thread::hardware_concurrency();
    const static unsigned nb_threads = (nb_threads_hint == 0u ? 8u : nb_threads_hint);

    // Size of a slice for the range functions
    Index n = end - start + 1;
    Index slice = (Index) std::round(n / static_cast (nb_threads));
    slice = std::max(slice, Index(1));

    // [Helper] Inner loop
    auto launchRange = [&func] (int k1, int k2) {
        for (Index k = k1; k < k2; k++) {
            func(k);
        }
    };

    // Create pool and launch jobs
    std::vector pool;
    pool.reserve(nb_threads);
    Index i1 = start;
    Index i2 = std::min(start + slice, end);

    for (unsigned i = 0; i + 1 < nb_threads && i1 < end; ++i) {
        pool.emplace_back(launchRange, i1, i2);
        i1 = i2;
        i2 = std::min(i2 + slice, end);
    }

    if (i1 < end) {
        pool.emplace_back(launchRange, i1, end);
    }

    // Wait for jobs to finish
    for (std::thread &t : pool) {
        if (t.joinable()) {
            t.join();
        }
    }
}

And I use it like this:

// prepare the execution plan
std::vector> bounds = prepareParallelChunks((uword) islands.size());

// run in parallel
ParallelFor(0, (int) bounds.size(), [&] (uword k) {

    // run chunk
    run_simulation(islands, res, *_options, bounds[k].first, bounds[k].second);

});

This last function is just to show the usage. In principle if I have 8 logical cores, there will be 8 threads.

When executing the program for 2000 simulations, the results are:

Windows: Logical cores at about 20%, simulation time: 145s.
Linux: Logical threads at about 100%, simulation time 35s.
MacOS: Logical threads at about 100%, simulation time 35s.

Is there something that I should be taking into account under Windows to make the threading use the full potential?

PS: I've used C++17 standard parallelfor algorithm and the same happens, I've used OpenMP and the same happens. I'm using the referenced parallelforref because it is C++11 compliant and runs in all 3 systems with no modification.

C++ parallel program is very slow on windows (Threading)

0 Answers