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[?] Use several processor cores with MMA V11.2?

I would like to acquire the use of a 22 core processor system. Does V 11.2 professional support that many cores, or do I need something else? I'm used to calling multiple cores with ParallelTable. Will that command automatically run that many cores, or do I need to learn new commands?

POSTED BY: Marvin Ray Burns
5 Replies

As far as I know, there is no difference in either features or performance between the various forms of Mathematica -- student, home, 'professional'. There may be a banner on the notebooks for the student version, but that has nothing to do with what the program can do.

At one time, the main difference was in the level of technical support, but I see that there is Premier Service for the home and student version. The marketing pages on the Wolfram Website will have details.

The main take-away is that there is no 'crippled' version of the desktop product.

George, I'm sorry for being redundant, but maybe you can answer the new part of my question for Szabolcs: Does the $MaxLicenseSubprocesses limit apply to ParallelTable; in other words should ParallelTable automatically run over all 22 cores or not? I would like to have this information before I ask for use of the fancy computer!

POSTED BY: Marvin Ray Burns

Yes, it applies to the parallel tools package, i.e. ParallelTable, ParallelMap, etc.

On my machine, the value is 16.

On our institute's computer cluster it's much larger.

BTW you can test that it applies to the parallel tools like this: LaunchKernels[20]. As output, I get 16 kernel objects and 4 sets of error messages.

POSTED BY: Szabolcs Horvát

You can check the maximum number of cores your license allows you to use with the parallel tools with $MaxLicenseSubprocesses.

I do not think that this limit applies to functions which are parallelized internally (but I am not sure).

The only explicit way to parallelize is the parallel tools (i.e. things like ParallelTable). There are no other commands to learn.

Usually, the parallelization overhead increases with the number of subprocesses, for you won't quite be able to get 4x the performance out of 24 cores than out of 6. But in the past, I used ~40 subprocesses once (if I remember correctly), so I do not expect problems with only 22. That was on a cluster, not on a single machine.

POSTED BY: Szabolcs Horvát

Szabolcs, Thank you. I don't have V 11.2 professional yet; $MaxLicenseSubprocesses gives 8 on my personal edition. Did you mean that that limit doesn't apply to ParallelTable?

Anyone, what does it give for student, and for professional? I have a licence for student but haven't downloaded it into my present 6-core machine yet because 11.2 personal is just a little slower than 11.1 personal computing the MRB constant using my best program (per core that is).

POSTED BY: Marvin Ray Burns
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