Re: Parallel package suggestion

Olaf Till <[email protected]> Fri, 12 Feb 2021 15:28:43 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.gnu.octave.maintainers
Message-ID	<20210212142843.GA30105@till>

On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 07:53:36PM +0100, Olaf Till wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 06, 2021 at 12:46:40PM -0600, vrozos wrote:
> > Regarding Parallel package [1], I have a suggestion.  On my understanding
> > (from applications on a single machine), Parallel starts Octave sub-engines.
> > When the whole job is finished, the sub-engines do not die. This can create
> > problems in cases where a kind of re-initialization is needed.
> > 
> > Consider this case. I am using Parallel along with the expansion of the
> > Genetic Algorithm package for GNU Octave that supports parallelization and
> > bounds [2]. After finishing the first optimization, I want to change the
> > loss-function. In this case, it seems that the sub-engines are not informed
> > about the change. They keep using the version of the loss-function they
> > first encountered.

Thinking about this -- probably the sub-engine Octaves should see such
a change, just as the main Octave session should see it, without
re-initialization. You could test if the main Octave session sees the
change.

Olaf

> > I would suggest adding a function to Parallel package that would perform
> > some kind of re-initialization of the created sub-engines, or at least kill
> > them.
> 
> But there is such a function:
> 
> https://octave.sourceforge.io/parallel/package_doc/parcellfun_005fset_005fnproc.html#XREFparcellfun_005fset_005fnproc
> 
> Olaf
> 
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