[Developers] admb threading

[John Sibert]

Johnoel and I need some feedback about how to approach threading. Dave 
has provided a nice proof of concept using pthreads to implement 
parallel processing on larger chunks of code. This approach is likely to 
have the biggest performance improvement, but seems application specific 
and would require more expertize on the part of users.

Alternatively it is possible to implement threading internally in the 
ADMB libraries, concentrating on smaller chunks of code, for instance 
the solve(...) function. This approach would probably have smaller 
performance payoff in most applications, but would be more transparent 
to users.

In principle, the two approaches are not mutually exclusive.

So my question to the ADMB Developer group is what did we mean when we 
assigned a high priority to parallelization?  Do we want parallel code 
that is "transparent" to the user (if so what parts of the would have 
the highest priority)? Or do we want to develop tools that allow users 
to create their on threaded code for specific applications? (Don't tell 
me both.)

Cheers,
John


-- 
John Sibert
Emeritus Researcher, SOEST
University of Hawaii at Manoa

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