I'm sorry but I don't quite understand what "not running solve() in this process" means. I updated the code and it do show that the result from clusterApply() are identical with the result from lapply(). Could you please explain more about this?
The point is that a parallel processing framework like Snow and PVM does not execute the operation in your (interactive) R session, but rather starts separate computing processes that carry out the actual calculation (while your R session is just waiting for the results to become available). These separate processes can either run on different computers in a network, or on your local machine (in order to make use of multiple CPU cores).
user system elapsed 0.584 0.144 4.355
user system elapsed 4.777 0.100 4.901
If you take a close look at your timing results, you can see that the total processing time ("elapsed") is only slightly shorter with parallelisation (4.35 s) than without (4.9 s). You've probably been looking at "user" time, i.e. the amount of CPU time your interactive R session consumed. Since with parallel processing, the R session itself doesn't perform the actual calculation (as explained above), it is mostly waiting for results to become available and "user" time is therefore reduced drastically. In short, when measuring performance improvements from parallelisation, always look at the total "elapsed" time.
So why isn't parallel processing twice as fast as performing the caculation in a single thread? Perhaps the advantage of using both CPU cores was eaten up by the communication overhead. You should also take into account that a lot of other processes (terminals, GUI, daemons, etc.) are running on your computer at the same time, so even with parallel processing you will not have both cores fully available to R. In my experience, there is little benefit in parallelisation as long as you just have two CPU cores on your computer (rather than, say, 8 cores).
Hope this clarifies things a bit (and is reasonably accurate, since I don't have much experience with parallelisation),
Stefan [ [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://purl.org/stefan.evert ] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
