Hi Simon,
I recently upgraded from Stata 9 SE to Stata 9 MP (duo core). And I had
exactly your question: would it appreciably reduce the run times of those
mid-duration tasks e.g., 30 seconds to a few minutes? I have definitely
noticed the improvement and found the upgrade to be well worth the cost.
-Brent
______________________________________________________
Brent D. Fulton, PhD
Health Services Researcher
Petris Center, School of Public Health, UC Berkeley
Phone: 510-643-4102
Fax: 510-643-4281
Email: [email protected]
www.petris.org
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Simon Moore
Sent: Sunday, July 01, 2007 6:20 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: st: Upgrading from v9 to v10mp
Dear Statalist,
There's several reasons why I'd like to upgrade from Stata 9 to Stata
10. But I have a question about MP and whether this is something I
should be looking at (as I have dual core CPU).
From the info I've found (http://www.stata.com/statamp/) MP is suitable
and *should* be faster for most analyses. The same info also states
that not all processes will run in parallel, however. It would seem
silly for me to pay extra only to find that the most computationally
intensive work I do (which isn't a great deal) cannot make use of this
extra processing power. So I was wondering whether anyone on Statalist
might be able to offer some thoughts?
Probably the most intensive work involves such things as xtlogit and
I've also looked at reoprob - with a large survey and bootstrapping
would MP work through user written commands (i.e. reoprob) any faster?
Other things that can take time include cycling through large -foreach
num- lists and using postfile (neither reoprob nor postfile are covered
in report.pdf at http://www.stata.com/statamp/) to generate a new
dataset. Would these be noticeably quicker under MP?
What's my MP criteria? I suppose shaving 1 or 2 seconds of something
that takes 1 or 2 seconds wouldn't be that useful, I just don't get
another sip of coffee. Similarly, shaving a few hours off something
that takes more 24 hours to run probably wouldn't mean that much as I'd
be doing something else anyway. It's the 'not quite long enough to go
do something useful' tasks where I'd find the extra speed most useful...
are the time savings linear over problem size?
Any thoughts greatly appreciated
Simon
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
