[R] Multithreading

[Luke Tierney]

On Tue, Apr 16, 2002 at 08:00:17AM -0400, Liaw, Andy wrote:
> > From: Peter Dalgaard BSA [mailto:p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk]
> > 
> > Lennart.Araskoug at astrazeneca.com writes:
> > 
> > > Hi !
> > > 
> > > I wonder if the R application is capable of utilizing more 
> > than one CPU. I
> > > need to know since we run it on a SunFire 3800 with 8 750 
> > USIII cpu:s and on
> > > a E420R with 4 USII cpu:s and we don't feel like we get the 
> > performance we
> > > could expect.
> > > 
> > > I've seen some old discussions claiming that it isn't.
> > 
> > It isn't ... yet. Duncan and Luke hope to get it going for 1.6.0.
> > 
> > You can in principle link against a threaded ATLAS library (although
> > there are known signal handling problems with that) and get multi-CPU
> > numerics performance. And of course run multiple instances of R.
> 
> When I was fooling with ATLAS and MKL a while ago, I found that when I use
> the threaded ATLAS, the elapsed time is actually longer than ATLAS w/o
> threads.  MKL, OTOH, did provide the almost doubled speed expected on the
> dual CPU box.  (Mandrake 7.1/R1.4.1/P3-866 Xeon).
> 
> Andy
> 

As I recall I did get about double speed with threaded ATLAS on a dual
P3 processor with the one or two examples I tread.  (SuSE
7.3/R-devel).

luke

-- 
Luke Tierney
University of Minnesota                      Phone:           612-625-7843
School of Statistics                         Fax:             612-624-8868
313 Ford Hall, 224 Church St. S.E.           email:      luke at stat.umn.edu
Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA                    WWW:  http://www.stat.umn.edu
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._