David Airey ([email protected]) wrote
> Here is a possibility for OpenMP for OS X. Will this suffice to allow
> SMP for StataSE for OS X?
Thank you David--we hadn't seen that, and it is very interesting.
David wrote this because a few days ago, Chinh Nguyen of StataCorp
made a post which said
> Something that surprisingly hasn't been asked is if we're planning
> on release an SMP version of Stata for Mac OS X. Currently, no, but
> only because the standard we've chosen for SMP is OpenMP which does
> not currently support OS X. If and when it does, our plans may
> change.
Chinh brought this up because the forthcoming G5 will have dual
processors, so naturally Mac OS X users might wonder if a
symmetric multi-processing version of Stata might be forthcoming.
Let me clarify. There is not currently an SMP version of Stata for
any platform. We have explored SMP internally. In that preliminary
look, the OpenMP standard for writing SMP code appeared to us to make
the most sense for Stata, and it is what we used to write some
preliminary evaluation code and do some timing tests.
We have not made a decision about whether to go forward with an
SMP Stata. It is certainly a very interesting and 'fun' topic from a
computer science point of view. Were we to kick off a development
effort to produce a SMP version of Stata, it could be over 1 or 2
years before a product suitable for shipping would be available.
If we decide to work on an SMP version of Stata, we will do our best
to produce the product for as many platforms as possible.
--Alan
([email protected])
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