why parfor is much slower than for when the overhead is negligible?

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i have a code shown below. it costs 660 seconds with regular for
however, with parfor, it costs more than half an hour. The point is that the overhead is negligible.
==================
clear all; close all; clc; tic
Nx=100; Ny=100;
plist=0.05:0.05:0.95;
linked_list=zeros(1,length(plist));
num_sample=20000;
matlabpool open 3
parfor sss=1:length(plist)
sss
p=plist(sss);
numlink=0;
for s10=1:num_sample
pattern=(rand(Ny,Nx)<p);
pattern2=zeros(Ny,Nx);
new=zeros(2,10000);
new2=zeros(2,10000);
num_new=0;
num_new2=0;
flag=0;
found=0;
s=0;
while (found==0)&&(s<Nx)
s=s+1;
if (pattern(1,s)==1)&&(pattern2(1,s)==0);
flag=flag+1;
pattern2(1,s)=flag;
num_new=1;
new(1,1)=s;
new(2,1)=1;
num_new2=0;
while num_new>0
num_new2=0;
for s1=1:num_new
x=new(1,s1);
y=new(2,s1);
if (x>1)&&(pattern(y,x-1)==1)&&(pattern2(y,x-1)~=flag)
num_new2=num_new2+1;
new2(1,num_new2)=x-1;
new2(2,num_new2)=y;
pattern2(y,x-1)=flag;
end
if (x<Nx)&&(pattern(y,x+1)==1)&&(pattern2(y,x+1)~=flag)
num_new2=num_new2+1;
new2(1,num_new2)=x+1;
new2(2,num_new2)=y;
pattern2(y,x+1)=flag;
end
if (y>1)&&(pattern(y-1,x)==1)&&(pattern2(y-1,x)~=flag)
num_new2=num_new2+1;
new2(1,num_new2)=x;
new2(2,num_new2)=y-1;
pattern2(y-1,x)=flag;
end
if (y<Ny)&&(pattern(y+1,x)==1)&&(pattern2(y+1,x)~=flag)
num_new2=num_new2+1;
new2(1,num_new2)=x;
new2(2,num_new2)=y+1;
pattern2(y+1,x)=flag;
end
end
num_new=num_new2;
new(:,1:num_new)=new2(:,1:num_new);
if max(new(2,1:num_new))==Ny
found=1;
break;
end
end
end
end
numlink=numlink+found;
end
linked_list(sss)=numlink/num_sample;
end
if matlabpool('size') > 0
matlabpool close
end
plot(plist,linked_list,'*')
toc

Answers (1)

Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 14 Sep 2011
The overhead for parfor is not negligible. There is a lot of cpu or core-level synchronization that has to happen as the bits of work get dispatched and the result copied back. That interferes a lot compared to a single cpu simply looping through items that are fully in primary cache.

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