[Rsiena-help] RSiena with multiple processes.

[Ruth M. Ripley]

Dear Karl,

Sorry, I realise I have been less than clear about this, probably because
I understand rather little about hardware. Basically, RSiena runs multiple
processes on request, and your operating system does the rest. So I can
run 10 processes on my 2-core machine, which is useful occasionally for
testing, but does not help speed wise, as there is a lot of swapping! I
suggest you match processes to processors that you can guarantee more or
less full use of (RSiena waits for the slowest, and I have found 8 shared
with others no faster than 6, as I got more or less full use of 6, but not
full use of 8.). The idea is to keep all the processors busy, but have
nothing waiting. If you can run 8 simultaneous processes on your machine,
try using 8 for RSiena. Trial and error will not do any harm! Each process
needs a separate copy of the data, and paging can slow things down if you
don't have enough memory. But I have rarely seen problems with memory.

Regards,

Ruth


On Wed, 31 Mar 2010, R. Karl Rethemeyer wrote:

> Thanks for the quick response. I had one other question regarding the multiprocessor option.
>
> If you click the "multiprocessor" box, you get the option of choosing the number of processors. What I am unclear about is whether a multi-core process is "multiprocessor" machine, or whether this refers only to separate physical processors.
>
> So...I have a desktop machine with two Xeon processors; each processor has four cores. So when I set the "multiprocessor" number, should it be "2" or "8"?
>
>
> Karl Rethemeyer
>
> --
> R. Karl Rethemeyer, PhD
> Associate Professor and Chair
> Department of Public Administration and Policy
> Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy
> University at Albany - SUNY
> Tel: (518) 442-5283
> Cell: (518) 253-5111
> Fax: (518) 442-5298
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ruth Ripley [mailto:ruth at stats.ox.ac.uk]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2010 7:28 PM
> To: noreply at r-forge.wu-wien.ac.at
> Subject: [rsiena-help][2700] RE: Issue with "Continue session from file"
>
>
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> By: Ruth Ripley
>
> I have just tried this out, and you are right that it does not seem to work
> as it should. It does save things, and reads in the file again, but does not
> seem to use the model options. It does seem to store the effects object and
> restore that, though. Which should mean you get the saved parameter estimates.
> It is correct that it asks for the session file: it loads the session file and
> then projname.Rdata. (So you must use the default name). But it then displays
> the Model options screen regardless... I will see what I can do to persuade
> it otherwise!
>
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