How many workers for fmincon with UseParallel?
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I'm solving a biggish problem where the function takes a while to compute and want to throw as many workers as possible on the problem.
- Is the reason to set UseParallel to true when solving a problem with fmincon that it can potentially speed up the evaluation of the problem's gradient?
- Say my problem has 100 variables. Could I then theoretically improve performance with up to 100 workers? Or does fmincon never use that many parallel processes?
1 Comment
Bruno Luong
on 1 Mar 2024
"Is the reason to set UseParallel to true when solving a problem with fmincon that it can potentially speed up the evaluation of the problem's gradient?"
Only if you don't provide the gradient then fmincon estimates the gradient using finite differnce, each component of the gradient can be estimated in parallel and UseParallel is set to TRUE.
Accepted Answer
Matt J
on 1 Mar 2024
Edited: Matt J
on 1 Mar 2024
Is the reason to set UseParallel to true when solving a problem with fmincon that it can potentially speed up the evaluation of the problem's gradient?
Yes.
Say my problem has 100 variables. Could I then theoretically improve performance with up to 100 workers? Or does fmincon never use that many parallel processes?
Theoretically. The number of workers can be set by you using parpool, if you have the Parallel Computing Toolbox, or fmincon will call parpool with default settings. How many workers you can create in a pool depends on your Matlab version and the resources available to your computer.
3 Comments
Matt J
on 1 Mar 2024
If it's a cluster, you'll also have to consider the time for transmitting data to the cluster nodes. If the work done by each node is much less than the communication time, you may not benefit much.
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