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, René 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...
René
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University of Iowa Phone: 319-335-3386
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