How to use a parfor loop inside a for loop?
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Dominik Mattioli
on 9 Mar 2018
Commented: Dominik Mattioli
on 9 Mar 2018
I have a for loop with variables that have dependency. Within that loop I would like to use parfor to perform a costly operation on a variable that is independent across iterations. Below I made an example; say that I want to perform myFun on each entry in the row (in parallel) corresponding to the iteration of the for-loop.
N = 10;
inputVar = [randi(100,N,1),zeros(N,1)];
out = cell(N,2)
for idx = 1:N
inputVars(idx,2) = idx;
parfor jdx = 1:2
out{jdx,kdx} = myFun(inputVars(jdx,kdx))
end
end
I'm new to parallel computing. Not sure if this example is a good one. I can provide a better example if asked.
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Accepted Answer
Walter Roberson
on 9 Mar 2018
Generally speaking you can do that. However, parfor will have an easier job if you write to an output that is indexed only by the loop index and possibly the : (colon) operator. For example,
temp_input = inputVars(:,kdx);
parfor jdx = 1 : 2
temp_out{jdx} = myfun(temp_input(jdx));
end
out(:,kdx) = temp_out;
3 Comments
Stephen23
on 9 Mar 2018
Edited: Stephen23
on 9 Mar 2018
@Dominik Mattioli: parfor is not guaranteed to be faster than for in all cases: if it was, then parfor would be the default! It is only faster if the overhead of initializing and handling the parallel processes is less than time gained running them. This is explained in the documentation:
and many threads on this forum, e.g.:
etc.
Your question states: "I would like to use parfor to perform a costly operation on a variable that is independent across iterations", so it really depends on how "costly" that operation really is.
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