Thank you Austin. That was very informative. It turns out that neither my example (bootstrap) nor my real interest (xtmelogit) utilizes multiple processors (but gllamm apparently does).
I'm currently sharing the server I'm on, so my timings would not be representative. But I'll certainly try it asap (just out of curiosity).
Thank you everyone.
- Elan
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected]
> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of
> Austin Nichols
> Sent: Friday, July 31, 2009 14:36
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: st: StataMP will not utilize multiple processors
> (Windows XP)
>
> MP only does fine-grain parallelization; -bootstrap- and -simulate- do
> not send iterations to separate processors, but each iteration to all
> available processors. About a year ago, I wrote -bs2- and -sim2- to
> split iterations across processors (just need to keep track of a list
> of random numbers), but they did not perform all that well, so I never
> released them. See the table on p.17 of
> http://www.stata.com/statamp/report.pdf for some expected time
> improvements for different commands.
>
> Can you show us some timings for your system like this:
>
> . drawnorm v1-v50, n(100000) clear
> (obs 100000)
> r; t=13.26 14:22:03
>
> . qui reg v*
> r; t=1.86 14:22:10
>
> . set processor 1
> number of available processor(s) changed from 2 to 1
> r; t=0.00 14:22:15
>
> . qui reg v*
> r; t=3.07 14:22:23
>
> . qui bs: reg v*
> r; t=123.09 14:24:51
>
> . set processor 2
> number of available processor(s) changed from 1 to 2
> r; t=0.00 14:25:04
>
> . qui bs: reg v*
> r; t=90.16 14:26:39
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 11:54 AM, Cohen, Elan<[email protected]> wrote:
> >> How do you know you are only using one processor?
> >
> > I'm watching the task manager as it's running. The Stata
> process only uses 13% of the CPU which is approximately 1/8 of 100%.
> >
> >> The bootstrap is not parallelized, but each iteration of the
> >> estimation should be.
> >
> > This begs the question, are there some Stata commands that
> are built to run on multiple processors and some that aren't?
> I would've thought, if any, bootstrap would work on multiple
> processors.
> >
> >
> >> On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 10:36 AM, Cohen,
> Elan<[email protected]> wrote:
> >> > Hi all,
> >> >
> >> > I'm running StataMP on a Windows server running XP. The
> >> computer has a Quad core processor, so 8 processors show up
> >> in the task manager (due to hyper threading, I believe).
> >> >
> >> > However, if I run a command, such as bootstrap, Stata will
> >> only allocate 1 processor to do the job.
>
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>
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