Re: Changing octave to exploit multi-core hardware

[Aaron Birenboim]

John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 24-Mar-2008, Leonardo Ecco wrote:
>
> | have you guys considered modifying the gnu octave code in order to take
> | advantage of multi-core hardware?
>
> In what way?
>
> | I'm a graduate student in computer
> | science, and i'm currently taking a course on multi-core systems - our final
> | project is to select an open source software and change it to exploit
> | parallelism. I'd like to know if there is someone already working on this
> | issue. If not, i plan to start next week.
>
> At what level do you want to do parallel operations?  Matrix
> operations?  Loops in the scripting language?  Something else?
>   
I'm not totally familiar with which matrix libraries have parallelism,
but many do.
Matlab seems to license some sort of Intel library.
I'd be surprised if GSL, LAPACK, etc do not have parallel extensions now.

Not the greatest learning experience, but certainly the most bang for
the buck would
be just to allow parallel versions in these libraries.
Attacking the general "slowness" of interpretation is tricky.

I sometimes invert 6000x6000 matrices, so the simple addition of a parallel
matrix inverter would be a big help.
Big principal-components problems are also common for me.

Matlab seems to have parallel versions of some simple operations,
like matrix multiplication, perhaps transpose, and point-by-point
operations.
These would give you some experience in actually writing simple parallel
code, if you are
looking for that.

Frankly, I go to Matlab for the big stuff on my main machine.
I install octave everyplace else (no licensing) for short, simple tasks.
I would certainly see a great benefit in adding some parallelism to some
of the core matrix ops.

                 aaron