[R-sig-hpc] rsprng wiki page

Ross Boylan ross at biostat.ucsf.edu
Fri Jul 31 19:56:46 CEST 2009


I have verified that rsprng does control the random normal generator as
well as others; I was uncertain about this before.  I've updated the
page to reflect this, as well as some other information about when to
initialize and free the stream.

Na (Michael) Li, the package author, confirms that rsprng uses the
default, rather than simple, interface to SPRNG.  This means that C code
in other packages do not have direct access to the stream.

On Wed, 2009-07-29 at 19:40 -0700, Ross Boylan wrote:
> http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=packages:cran:rsprng has a
> page I just created on parallel random number generation under R with
> SPRNG.
> 
> It includes some cautions about how to use the package and some thoughts
> about how to enhance it.  I'm working on code changes along the lines
> suggested there.
> 
> I hope that the information there is accurate; it's quite possible it is
> not.  In particular, although I think earlier discussion (can't find it
> now) indicated that rsprng uses the simple interface to SPRNG, the code
> doesn't look that way.  I think with the simple interface my C code
> would get the same random number stream as the R code, because there is
> only one stream.  Without it, my C code needs the stream id from R in
> order to access the same stream.
> 
> The page also indicates a number of things I'm uncertain about.
> 
> If you're interested, please look, comment, and edit as you see fit.
> 
> Ross Boylan
>



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