multithreading calling from the rpy Python package
There are several sets of notes on threading off http://developer.r-project.org page--somewhat old but still relevant. The Python approach is discussed there. That approach, which gives concurrency but not parallelism, is in principle fleasible for R but getting from here to there is non-trivial given that we have some unique issues related to FORTRAN semantics as well as how many R packages are written. It may happen yet, but probably later rather than sooner. Best, luke
On Fri, 20 Oct 2006, Ren? J.V. Bertin wrote:
Since Python has been mentioned in this context: Could not Python's threading model and implementation serve as a guideline?
From a few simple benchmarks I've run, it seems as if the Python
interpreter itself is thread-safe but not threadable. That is, when I run something "pure Python" like a recursive function that returns the nth Fibonacci number in parallel, there is no speed-up for 2 threads on a dual-processor machine. However, calling sleep in parallel does scale down with the number of threads, even on a single-processor ;) Real-life code does tend to speed up somewhat, though never as much as one would hope. Just an idea... Ren?
______________________________________________ R-devel at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
Luke Tierney
Chair, Statistics and Actuarial Science
Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences
University of Iowa Phone: 319-335-3386
Department of Statistics and Fax: 319-335-3017
Actuarial Science
241 Schaeffer Hall email: luke at stat.uiowa.edu
Iowa City, IA 52242 WWW: http://www.stat.uiowa.edu