[R] speed of makeCluster (package parallel)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 28/10/2013 16:19, Arnaud Mosnier wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am quite new in the world of parallelization and I wonder if there is a
> way to increase the speed of creation of a parallel socket cluster. The
> time spend to include threads increase exponentially with the number of

It increases linearly in my tests (or a decent OS).  But really if 
parallel computing is worthwhile you will be doing minutes of work on 
each worker process and the startup time will not be signifcant.

> thread considered and I use of computer with two 8 cores CPU and thus
> showing a total of 32 threads in windows 7.

The first way to speed things up: use a decent OS:  forking clusters is 
much faster.

> Currently, I use the default parameters (type = "PSOCK"), but is there any
> fine tuning parameters that I can use to take advantage of this system ?
>
> Thanks in advance for your help !
>
> Arnaud
>
> R version 3.0.1 (2013-05-16)
> Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]


-- 
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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