[ADMB Users] DLLs

[Mark Payne]

Dear ADMBers,

I am currently using ADMB to process a large set of satellite data that I have - this essentially involves running the ADMB model a few hundred thousand times from within my R wrapper, once for each of the pixels that I am examining. Being ADMB, it is of course blindingly fast, but when multiplied by 1e6 repetitions, things start to take a while.  The obvious solution is to distribute the computing task across our cluster here. This, however, would require a bit of a rethink about how I interface between R and ADMB. There are two ways that I see that this can be done 

1. continue with the current system ie writing the data to HDD, running ADMB, reading the results
2. convert the ADMB code to a DLL, and interface directly that way.

The question that I have is how are things at the moment with the DLL interfacing? It clearly takes some work to convert the code - is it worth the effort? How easy is it to do? How much of a speed improvement can I expect? Am mainly looking for some personal experiences from people to advise if this is a good idea or not...

Cheers,

Mark