On Jul 9, 12:44 am, Stefan Behnel <stefan...@behnel.de> wrote: > Felix, 09.07.2010 05:39: > Well, at least its "parallel processing abilities" are quite good actually. > If you have really large computations, they usually run on more than one > computer (not just more than one processor). So you can't really get around > using something like MPI, in which case an additional threading layer is > basically worthless, regardless of the language you use. For computations, > threading keeps being highly overrated.
That is certainly true for large computations. But many smaller tasks are run on single machines and it does make a difference if they take 1 minute per run or 10. The average number of cores per computer has been increasing for quite a while now. It seems unfortunate to be restricted to using only one of them at a time (for regular loops, not mathematical vector operations). Python has made so many complicated things easy, but I have not seen an easy way to parallelize a simple loop on a multicore CPU without having to set up infrastructure and/or incurring large overhead from many interpreters and marshalling data. Just the fact that there is such a large number of attempts out there to fix this suggests that something important is missing. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
