kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Maciej Sumiński <maciej.suminski@xxxxxxx>]

On 01/10/2014 08:45 PM, Vesa Solonen wrote:
> 10/01/14 19:35, Maciej Sumiński kirjoitti:
>
> > the board that I recommended for testing the GAL
> > (http://www.ohwr.org/attachments/download/2187/wrs.kicad_pcb), when you
> > drag the biggest IC in the middle, as it contains the greatest number of
> > nets connected. After being dropped you may observe a freeze for a short
> > time, it is the ratsnest algorithm going - we have to decide if it is
> > acceptable.
>
> While the big redesign/rewrite of Kicad core is going on, it might be a
> good moment to think some radical moves. Designing all computationally
> intensive parts with multi core processors, de facto available
> SIMD/Vector instructions and OpenCL in mind.
>
> As an example instruct the compiler to autovectorize just that ratsnest
> calculation. Or the previous plus function written to support multiple
> threads. Running the UI thread and processing threads separate, say the
> ratsnest being constantly iterated in the background when it changes.
>
> Just by GCC autovectorization its easy to get ten times more comparing
> or multiplying performane.
>
> -Vesa

I fully support the idea, in fact I have dreamed about this too 
(http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki/ratsnest-gal#Possible-upgrades). 
I had a short try with OpenMP, but I did not get any better results, so 
it seems that I could have done it wrong.
If there are volunteers who have some experience with parallelization I 
am very eager to cooperate to speed up some of computations. The 
ratsnest algorithm is a perfect place to start with. It is performed on 
per net basis, so they are all independent to each other.

Regards,
Orson