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System wide parallel defaults

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg114388] System wide parallel defaults
• From: Chris Jewell <chris.jewell at warwick.ac.uk>
• Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2010 05:18:52 -0500 (EST)

Hi All,

I'm trying to adjust the default system wide settings for Mathematica 
7.0 parallel computing setup under Linux.  As you know, the default 
(Local Kernel "Automatic") parallel settings in Mathematica assign the 
number of kernels to be equal to the number of processors present on the 
machine.  However, our GridEngine setup binds jobs to cores, with the 
result that if a user requests a serial job, then all kernels end up 
bound to one core.  This slows down the job, and messes with the Linux 
kernel's load average.  So, what I'd like to do is to set the system 
wide default parallel settings to disable Local Kernels, and give the 
settings for Mathematica to integrate with GridEngine so that informed 
users can then enable the parallel environment if they wish (and submit 
the associated parallel job with the correct submission command).

I followed the instructions in the user manual for the FrontEnd 
defaults: run Mathematica, make changes to the parallel environment, 
exit, and copy $UserDirectory/FrontEnd/init.m to 
$BaseDirectory/FrontEnd/init.m.  However, this does not appear to work 
for the parallel settings.  Can anyone give me a solution to set 
system-wide parallel settings?

Thanks,

Chris

PS. I'm not a Mathematica user, unfortunately, so I'm not very familiar 
with Mathematica code.  Please bear with me!
--
Dr Chris Jewell
Department of Statistics
University of Warwick
Coventry
CV4 7AL
UK
Tel: +44 (0)24 7615 0778