Hey my R buddies, I installed the "snow" and "rpvm" package on my Lenovo Thinkpad T400 today. The experiment below gave me a surprise. The time consumed by serial processing was several times larger than that taken by parallel processing. I'm very curious how this happened. Thank you very much.
> library(snow) > > cc <- makePVMcluster(2) > > temp <- list(matrix(rnorm(1000000),1000),matrix(rnorm(1000000),1000)) > > system.time(tt <- clusterApply(cc,temp,"solve")) user system elapsed 0.584 0.144 4.355 > system.time(ttt <- sapply(temp,"solve")) user system elapsed 4.777 0.100 4.901 I'm using Ubuntu 8.10. And here's my CPU info: processor : 0 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 23 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8400 @ 2.26GHz stepping : 6 cpu MHz : 800.000 cache size : 3072 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 0 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 0 initial apicid : 0 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts pni monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr sse4_1 lahf_lm bogomips : 4521.96 clflush size : 64 power management: processor : 1 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 23 model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8400 @ 2.26GHz stepping : 6 cpu MHz : 800.000 cache size : 3072 KB physical id : 0 siblings : 2 core id : 1 cpu cores : 2 apicid : 1 initial apicid : 1 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 10 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts pni monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr sse4_1 lahf_lm bogomips : 4521.97 clflush size : 64 power management: -- 彭河森 Hesen Peng http://hesen.peng.googlepages.com/ ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.