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Illusory Multicore Support in 5.2?

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg66000] Illusory Multicore Support in 5.2?
• From: "Contrablue" <tetraploidhybrid at hotmail.com>
• Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2006 04:38:10 -0400 (EDT)
• Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

Greetings,

One of the reasons I upgraded to Mathematica 5.2 was to enjoy the
benefits of multicore support.  However, despite my running 5.2 on a
Windows XP x64  dual Opteron system, I have yet to see evidence that
more than one kernel thread runs in parallel (the evidence, on my
system, would be to see processor utilization rise above 50% while only
the Mathematica kernel was active).  This is despite trying quite a few
evaluations of code that "should" -- according Wolfram documentation --
initiate parallel execution on my system (numerical dot products, etc.)

Please note, my system fully supports true multithreaded execution on
two CPUs, as evidenced by 100% CPU utilization on relevant Sandra
benchmarks and on the new multithreaded POV-Ray releases for AMD64.

Has anyone verified multithreaded kernel operation of Mathematica 5.2
on a dual processor Windows platform?  If so, could you post a snippet
of your Mathematica expressions here?

Thanks much!

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Illusory Multicore Support in 5.2?
    • From: Pratik Desai <pratikd@wolfram.com>