Re: Parallel copy

On Thu, 20 Feb 2020 at 18:43, David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> wrote:>
> On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 02:36:02PM +0100, Tomas Vondra wrote:
> > I think the wc2 is showing that maybe instead of parallelizing the
> > parsing, we might instead try using a different tokenizer/parser and
> > make the implementation more efficient instead of just throwing more
> > CPUs on it.
>
> That was what I had in mind.
>
> > I don't know if our code is similar to what wc does, maytbe parsing
> > csv is more complicated than what wc does.
>
> CSV parsing differs from wc in that there are more states in the state
> machine, but I don't see anything fundamentally different.

The trouble with a state machine based approach is that the state
transitions form a dependency chain, which means that at best the
processing rate will be 4-5 cycles per byte (L1 latency to fetch the
next state).

I whipped together a quick prototype that uses SIMD and bitmap
manipulations to do the equivalent of CopyReadLineText() in csv mode
including quotes and escape handling, this runs at 0.25-0.5 cycles per
byte.

Regards,
Ants Aasma