Re: Possible (summer of code) projects for Octave

[David Bateman]

Jaroslav Hajek-2 wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 8:10 PM, Daniel Kraft <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Still,
>> maybe there are currently some ideas or motivation to try something into
>> that direction?  Otherwise, I also read something about attempts to make
>> use
>> of multiple cores -- this sounds interesting, too, are the ongoing
>> projects
>> towards (or interest in) that?  Some other things that would be useful
>> for
>> Octave and the user community?
>>
> 
> I think what Octave needs to be considered seriously in the future is
> better support for high-level parallelism. Low-level cheap stuff like
> parallelizing sum() is laughable, IMHO - might be good for MW to boost
> their PR image, but in real life that will win you almost nothing. I
> and D. Bateman actually experimented with code to parallelize some
> element-wise matrix operations, and the results were, IMHO, poor.
> 

Parallelizing the element-wise matrix operators gave poor performance, but
parallelizing the mapper functions gave speed-ups that scaled well with the
number of cores. In the thread

http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/Using-OpenMP-in-Octave-td1694553.html

You tested with 2 threads and Kai Habel with 4 and you both showed nearly
linear speed-up with the mapper functions. Kai on his AMD even showed slight
improvements for the element-wise operators. I'd say its worth trying to
improve the speed of the mappers.

D.

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