Existence of parallel computing resources (statistics, etc)?

Hi there

I am running some long processes within a for-loop and have started wondering if I might be able to speed up the whole thing by using parallel computing and parfor-loops instead. Can anyone recommend me any good resources on this matter? I'm thinking statistics, computer-time vs. number of parallel workers for different problems, etc.

Thanks in advance

Jakob

Answer 1

[Edric Ellis]

There are some simple benchmark results for PARFOR here. Whether your particular problem will speed up using PARFOR depends on a number of factors:

1. How much of your problem is amenable to parallelisation (Amdahl's law)
2. Are you going to run only on your local machine, or do you have a cluster
3. Is your problem already benefiting from MATLAB' built-in multithreading (multithreading generally beats PARFOR on a single machine if it is available)
4. The data access pattern of your problem (i.e. do you need to transmit large amounts of data compared to the amount of computation you're doing)

Answer 2

[Jakob Sievers]

Thanks Edric. Your answer was just what I needed!