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A question about parallel computation in mathematica

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg103472] A question about parallel computation in mathematica
• From: pratip <pratip.chakraborty at gmail.com>
• Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:50:59 -0400 (EDT)

Hi Everybody,

Recently I was looking through many parallel computation example in
the documentation of Mathematica 7.0.1. If not very clear and adequate
those documentation looks pretty impressive at the first glance. Hence
I decided to do some Mathematica implementation of the small piece of
software named Super Pi which is very famous among the common over
clockers. It computes Pi up to a user defined decimal digits but in
parallel using all the cores of your processor. Have look
http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=36
So my goal was to write a pure Mathematica code that computes Pi up to
three million decimal digits eight times in parallel using the eight
kernels available in my pc. However to compute this task once in my pc
it requires just around 3.885 seconds (with Intel Core i7 975 extreme
processor).

fun[n_]:=Module[{a,tic,toc},
tic=TimeUsed[];
a=N[Pi,n*10^6];
toc=TimeUsed[];
toc-tic
];
(*For 3 million decimal digits*)
In[24]:= fun[3]
Out[24]= 3.885

Now let's see the parallel configuration of the PC. One can see that I
indeed have eight kernels present in the system.

In[16]:= ParallelEvaluate[$ProcessID]
Out[16]= {6712,6636,7928,4112,7196,5832,3992,7484}

In[17]:= ParallelEvaluate[$MachineName]
Out[17]= {flowcrusher-pc,flowcrusher-pc,flowcrusher-pc,flowcrusher-
pc,flowcrusher-pc,flowcrusher-pc,flowcrusher-pc,flowcrusher-pc}

Now to compute the same thing eight times but in parallel I tried the
following combinations with no success at all. See yourself the
disappointing timing results.

First:
In[2]:= b=Table[3,{i,1,8}];tic=TimeUsed[];re=Parallelize[Map[fun[#]
&,b],Method->"CoarsestGrained"];
toc=TimeUsed[];
toc-tic
Out[4]= 30.935

Second:
In[11]:= b=Table[3,{i,1,8}];tic=TimeUsed[];re=Parallelize[Map[fun[#=
]
&,b],Method->"FinestGrained"];
toc=TimeUsed[];
toc-tic
Out[13]= 30.872

Third:
In[18]:= ParallelMap[fun[#] &, b] // Timing

Out[18]= {30.81, {3.884, 3.822, 3.854, 3.853, 3.837, 3.869, 3.822,
 3.869}}

Fourth:
In[21]:= ParallelTable[fun[3],{i,1,8}]//Timing
Out[21]= {30.747,{3.868,3.807,3.837,3.838,3.806,3.854,3.884,3.853}}

Now finally to validate the fact that in spite of all these parallel
commands only one single kernel is getting used by Mathematica we map
our function over a list of eight threes b={3,3,3,3,3,3,3,3} and get
the total time for the repetitive computation.

Validation of the claim:
In[16]:= Map[fun[#]&,b]//Timing
Out[16]= {30.748,{3.854,3.822,3.853,3.838,3.837,3.822,3.869,3.853}}

This shows that parallel commands used in the above codes had been
simply useless.

I will highly appreciate if any of you guys can shade some light on
this problem. It is very basic in nature but the idea involved is
quite central in parallel computing. What I expect is that a neat and
clean Mathematica code can be written for this problem that will bring
the computation time to somewhere around 6-8 seconds in place of 30-31
seconds as we have seen above. I will continue trying on the problem
but in the mean time if any of you want to give it a try.

With best regards to all.

Pratip Chakraborty

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: A question about parallel computation in mathematica
    • From: Patrick Scheibe <pscheibe@trm.uni-leipzig.de>