On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 9:28 AM, Simon Urbanek <simon.urba...@r-project.org> wrote: > Things cannot happen if you don't ask ... > > Cheers, > Simon > Then I have two questions.
1) What multicore package? I didn't know there was one, and would be interested in seeing what it does. 2) Has there been any consideration of using Intel's threading building blocks library? They do have an open source version. It can apparently be built on Unix and Windows, and since it is open source, you can adapt it to any platform that you need to support if there is one that it doesn't presently support. And it allows a programmer to work at a higher logical level than if he focussed largely on the lower level details of creating and managing threads (for example, one can create a 'parrallel for loop' and the library, once properly initialized, will handle creating and cleaning up after any new threads that may be needed): now that is a freedom in multithreaded programming I truly appreciate. According to the documentation I have read, it scales well to larger numbers of processors or cores. The code in it that I have studied is all C++, so if there is much C++ code in R, it presents an option. I do know, though, that in my C++ code where it would provide a benefit (mostly vector and matrix algebra), most of it would need to be completely rewritten. It does present a rather different way of thinking about multithreaded programming (it reminds me of the sort of thing I did when writing code to run on a supercomputer supporting vector algebra decades ago). With ITT, if Lapack was rewritten to take advantage of it, much of the code would look quite different from what it does today. Of course, if you're already using it, I might as well shut up and go away. ;-) I am just learning to use it, as I am just learning to use R, so I am afraid I can't offer much more info than this, though. Cheers, Ted ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
