Re: Parallel computing abilitites in GSL?

["Hossein S. Zadeh" <hossein at bf dot rmit dot edu dot au>]

On Sun, 7 Jul 2002, Brian Gough wrote:

> Wartan Hachaturow writes:
>  > The question is: what do you think -- is it overall possible to create
>  > some (perhaps, built-in in the library (best) or it could be separate
>  > compilable wrapper, or something like that) support for out-of-the-box
>  > paralleling of gsl-using applications?
> 
> Basically parallel algorithms are outside the scope of GSL, because
> they would require a different design.

Hi there,
I agree and disagree!! I agree that a generalised kind of parallelism is
well outside the scope of GSL. But algorithms like Simulated Annealing can
have a parameter to specify how many child threads to spawn. On a
multi-cpu system this could help a lot. And even though this doesn't help
with load distribution over a cluster, it makes it easier to incorporate
it in things like PVM. (I haven't actually used Simulated Annealing in
GSL, so this might already be provided??)

cheers,
Hossein