bigGP (version 0.1.8)

bigGP.init: Initialize bigGP package

Description

bigGP.init initializes the bigGP and must be called before using any bigGP functionality. It starts slave processes, if not already started, and sets up the necessary objects containing information for distributing calculations correctly. It also initializes the RNG on the slave processes.

Usage

bigGP.init(P = NULL, parallelRNGpkg = "rlecuyer", seed = 0)

Arguments

P

Number of slave processes. Should be equal to D(D+1)/2 for some integer D. If NULL, will be taken to be mpi.comm.size()-1, where the additional process is the master.

parallelRNGpkg

Package to be used for random number generation (RNG). At the moment this should be one of relecuyer or rsprng, and these packages must be installed.

seed

Seed to be used for initializing the parallel RNG.

Details

The initialization includes starting the slave processes, calculating the partition factor, \(D\), and providing the slave processes with unique identifying information. This information is stored in the .bigGP object on each slave process.

Note that in general, the number of processes (number of slave processes, P, plus one for the master) should not exceed the number of physical cores on the machine(s) available.

bigGP.init also sets up random number generation on the slaves, using parallelRNGpkg when specified, and setting appropriate seeds on each slave process.

Examples

if (FALSE) {
bigGP.init(3, seed = 1)
}