WRITE and string compares acquiring locks and degrading multicore performance!

[rashed_iqbal]

I am using OpenMP with FORTRAN to parallelize an algorithm.

I was getting poor performance for higher number of cores ( > 3). Some analysis revealed that the culprit is WRITE statement I used in parallel section to transfer data. Apparently WRITE acquires a lock and thus degrades performance. I replaced the WRITE statement with my routine to transfer data and the problem went away.

I also noticed a similar problem while doing string compares in FORTRAN where it appeared to acquire a lock degrading performance at higher number of cores.

Did any one has seen a similar issue?
Is this behavior expected of WRITE and string compares in FORTRAN? (I could not find anything to this effect in refence manual of FORTRAN).

Thanks so much,

-rashed

[TimP]

WRITEs to the same unit (including *) would be serialized. If each thread WRITEs to a different unit, serialization may depend on which OpenMP version is involved, and may be affected by other options, such as Intel Fortran buffered_io.
Serialization of string compare ought to be avoidable, but certainly there would be a number of possible ways in which threading scaling may be broken.
Did you check your code with a tool such as Intel Thread Checker, and did you take advantage of the affinity tools of your platform?

[rashed_iqbal]

Yes. I did check the code with Intel Thread Check (and earlier through VTune) and that's how pin pointed the problem. I would have imagined this (acquisitin of the lock that is) to be possible for WRITE but not for _for_cpstr.

If anyone aware of a list of FORTRAN functions (like WRITE) which would result in acquisition of a lock?

Thanks,

-rashed