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What are my best options for taking advantage of multiple cores?

asked 2010-08-19 01:06:30 +0100

ccanonc
577 ●21 ●31 ●45

updated 2011-04-28 18:32:57 +0100

Kelvin Li
503 ●5 ●12 ●17

What are my best options for taking advantage of multiple cores?

For the pure python case?

For working with sets of particular libraries which sage interfaces?

Note: Apple just started offering 12-core mac-pros (24 virtual cpus with hyper-threading). Since the transistors are getting about as small as they can, parallel computing is impacting the entire technology stack. Please note I'm not asking how to categorize algorithms, I'm aware that some naturally parallelize better than others. This is a recipes/examples question.

Does Sage already comprehensively address this, and if not, does the Sage roadmap address it?

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answered 2010-08-19 02:16:57 +0100

William Stein
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updated 2010-08-19 02:17:13 +0100

Does Sage already comprehensively address this, and if not,

Sage certainly doesn't comprehensively address this -- in fact, parallel techniques are only used a tiny bit.

does the Sage roadmap address it?

The Sage roadmap, such as it is, doesn't address parallel computing.

This is a recipes/examples question.

Type

sage: parallel?
Check out the multiprocessing module in Python but watch out -- sometimes you really have to understand how certain things in Sage works to safely use it.
Learn about mpi4py, if you are really, really serious about fine-grained parallel computing.
Try out David Harvey's multithreaded bernoulli number code. Type bernoulli? for details.

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Thanks very much, these are good answers.

ccanonc ( 2010-08-19 02:20:05 +0100 )edit

Does Cython have multicore plans? Cython seems very important for custom code.

ccanonc ( 2010-08-19 13:36:58 +0100 )edit

I have searched the "python parallel programming" string in Google and it gives the links to several different libraries and approaches to parallelization in python programs. But I would like to know if there is a preferred way of parallelizing the Sage scripts and whether Sage will provide such functionality out-of-the-box some day? (or maybe Python itself will?)

v_2e ( 2011-01-30 06:35:16 +0100 )edit

3

answered 2010-08-19 02:09:48 +0100

Dan Drake
141 ●1 ●4 ●9 http://mathsci.kaist.a...

As a start, check out the @parallel decorator, and the @fork decorator (which I think is not yet in Sage; it was briefly merged on the way to 4.5.2, and then pulled because of doctest failures); see #9501 and #9631.

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Thanks. Thumbs-Up IOU.

ccanonc ( 2010-08-19 02:14:45 +0100 )edit

0

answered 2010-08-19 12:50:11 +0100

mvngu
346 ●1 ●1 ●9

You could install parallel Python using your Sage installation and then use functionalities of parallel Python to run some computation that exploits a multi-core system.

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What's the command, or set of commands to use different python distros with sage?

ccanonc ( 2010-08-19 12:59:39 +0100 )edit

0

answered 2016-08-26 17:12:08 +0100

doom
81 ●2 ●3 ●7

Meanwhile your high end gaming GPU might have 1500 cores in it. NVIDIA has a pretty good blas library that runs on their gpu's using CUDA. You can get access to CUDA through PyCuda https://mathema.tician.de/software/py...

I believe that numba has a more direct link to cublas http://numba.pydata.org/

Of course this is for numerics. Wouldn't it be nice to write some opencl or cuda backends for some of the symbolic processing? I'd have to think that theorem proving or term rewriting is embarrassingly parallel based on the pure combinatorial searches that it entails.

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