parallelisation_test

⚠️ Warning: Experimental ⚠️

Parallelisation test is a simple program in Octave where I wanted to learn how to parallelise only a piece of code (function) in a sequential process. The target of this program is to learn how to pass the input parameters to the pararray function.

OS and Octave specs

It runs in Octave 5.2.0 version in Mac OS Catalina version 10.15.5 Beta (19F62f)

Additional packages needed

• parallel-4.0.0 hosted in Octave Forge (https://sourceforge.net/p/octave/package-releases/413/attachment/parallel-4.0.0.tar.gz). Previous releases didn't work for me. This package needs struct pkg to be installed first.
• struct-1.0.16 hosted in Octave Forge (https://octave.sourceforge.io/download.php?package=struct-1.0.16.tar.gz). As a dependency of parallel package.

The packages loading instructions are included in parallelisation_test.m initial lines. It could have been done also in .octaverc file but for doing the initialisation of the environment easier, they have been included in the main program file. So, prior to run the parallelisation_test program you need to install the packages from an octave terminal:

option 1

On this case, the tarball files are packages/ folder pkg("install", "./packages/struct-1.0.16.tar.gz"); pkg("install", "./packages/parallel-4.0.0.tar.gz");

option 2

Or you can do it downloading directly the files from Octave Forge running the following instructions: pkg("install", "-forge", "struct"); pkg("install", "-forge", "parallel");

Once the packages have been installed, the environment is ready to execute the program. The parallelisation_test.m file is the main one.

• populationGenerator.m generates the input population cell array
• evaluationParallel_test.m is the piece of code that I'm interested in parallelising
• LsystemGeneratorNP_test.m and getAspectRatioNP_test.m (invoked by evaluationParallel_test.m) should be kept as sequential execution functions
• aspectratio and distancetoaspectratio returned by getAspectRationNP_test function and later by evaluationParallel_test to the main program, ought to be the same size of P which is a cell string array with the initial set of elements.

How to run it

From a terminal (in my case it's a -zsh bash) it can execute as following:

octave parallelisation_test.m

or from an octave terminal:

parallelisation_test.m