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Re: running multiple mathkernel's

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg90417] Re: running multiple mathkernel's
• From: Jens-Peer Kuska <kuska at informatik.uni-leipzig.de>
• Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2008 07:49:55 -0400 (EDT)
• Organization: Uni Leipzig
• References: <g4v35e$ii3$1@smc.vnet.net>
• Reply-to: kuska at informatik.uni-leipzig.de

Hi,

and start a second Mathematica ? FrontEnd Plus Kernel doe not help ?
At least under Windows and Linux this should work.

Regards
   Jens

Bob F wrote:
> Is there a way to automatically have Mathematica v6 run a separate
> MathKernel for two notebooks so that they could run concurrently? I
> was running a really long calculation that ended up taking about an
> hour, and so opened up another notebook to do something else while I
> waited for the other notebook to finish running. I thought that
> Mathematica would run the second MathKernel that is available for this
> second notebook, but the only thing that happened in the second
> notebook was wait for the first one to finish.
> 
> So I started looking into setting up a second kernel via the
> "Evaluation/Kernel Configuration Options" menu item, and added a
> second MathKernel to automatically launch on front end startup,
> thinking that Mathematica would use this spare MathKernel on the
> second notebook, but it didn't. I could see the two MathKernel
> processes running, but only one of them would actually run all the
> notebooks that I tried to run at the same time.
> 
> What I ended up doing was manually assigning a kernel to the second
> notebook with the "Evaluation/Notebook's Kernel", and then finally it
> would run at the same time as the other. I tried this on both Mac and
> Windows versions of Mathematica V6 with similar behavior and results.
> 
> After spending the time in getting all this done, I thought surely
> there must be a way for Mathematica to automatically use as many
> MathKernel's as needed for running more than one notebook at a time,
> within the limit's of your licenses. With a normal Mathematica license
> you can run up to two MathKernel processes and one front end
> Mathematica processor. I even thought that if you had two licenses on
> two different computers that you could conceivably run 4 MathKernel's,
> but this is apparently only possible if you have something called
> network licensing, which costs more money than a normal license. There
> is also something called PersonalGrid that has up to 5 MathKernals (1
> master plus 4 computation kernels) but am guessing it would have the
> same issue of having to manually assign a kernel to a notebook, so
> each notebook program could conceivably run at the same time. Does
> anyone know if this is the case or not? If not how does it really
> work?
> 
> What is the purpose of having two MathKernel processes as part of the
> license if you have to go thru all the extra work of manual
> assignment? Why doesn't Mathematica do this automatically for you??  I
> had a suggestion that I should run two copies of Mathematica, but that
> seemed way to much overhead for what I wanted to do. Is this what most
> people do who have a similar situation of one really long calculation
> and wanting to do other work in another notebook while waiting for the
> long one to finish?
> 
> Does anyone have any suggestions on how to do this association of
> notebooks to MathKernel processes so that they could be running at the
> same time in some sort of automatic fashion and avoid having to
> manually manage it like I did?? It would seem that with multi-core and
> multi-processor systems becoming more common that this would be of
> interest to more and more people. Any comments or suggestions of how
> this works in Mathematica?
> 
> Thanks...
> 
> -Bob
>