[R] Multithreading

[ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk]

On 16 Apr 2002, Timothy H. Keitt wrote:

> This seems entirely reasonable. We shouldn't expect a language like R to
> deliver native high performance computing; its value is as a layer above
> highly optimized C/Fortran/other code, e.g. Atlas. Probably, the biggest
> short term gain in performance would be to implement parallel versions
> (threads, pvm, mpi) of apply and friends. I've lately been getting up to
> 10x performance improvements after replacing explicit loops with lapply
> statements called on closures.

Careful!  They are running (arbitrary) R code, and Luke's caveats apply.
Internally lapply does an eval(), and we can't have more than one of
those running at once without all the perils of user R-level threads,
as I understand it.

apply() is expensive because of the checking/housekeeping it does, and so
it seems not worthwhile re-writing it in internal code, whereas it was
worth it for lapply.  Generally if an apply call is expensive, see if it
can (easily) be rewritten with lapply.


>
> T.
>
> On Tue, 2002-04-16 at 07:29, Luke Tierney wrote:
> > in my view, highly unlikely that these R level threads will be able to
> > run in parallel any time soon, if ever.  At least initially it is
> > almost certain that we will have to use an approach similar to the one
> > used in Python and have a global lock that makes sure at most one
> > threads is running in R code at any given time. (There will be context
>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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