asking bob to use multiple cores available in local CPU

[Abhishek Dutta]

Hi all,
I just installed Bob 1.1.2 in a Fedora Core 14 and it runs well. My machine has 8 cores but when I run facereclib (built on top of Bob, not yet released [1]), it only uses a single core (see the attached screenshot).

Is there any way to make Bob utilize all the available cores when running its operations?

[1] M. G ̈nther, R. Wallace, S. Marcel, An open source framework for standardized comparisons of face recognition algorithms, in: Computer Vision–ECCV 2012. Workshops and Demonstrations, Springer, pp. 547–
556.

Regards,
Abhishek

[Jörg Harder]

Dear Abhishek,

currently, the FaceRecLib does not support multi-threading. The only way
to parallelize the computation is via SGE using the gridtk
(http://pypi.python.org/pypi/gridtk). In its current version, gridtk
runs only on Idiap machines, but it should be easy to adapt it to other
SGE grids.

Internally, we discussed the implementation of a unified interface to
execute either in the SGE or parallel on the local machine. So far we
decided not to do it since it seemed quite complicated and useless for
Idiap. If I find some time, I will look to that issue in more detail,
maybe there is an easier solution.

Sorry for that.
Manuel

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[Abhishek Dutta]

Thanks for the quick reply.

Bob depends on many libraries (Blitz++, numpy, lapack, etc). So, one possible solution would be to let these dependencies use multiple cores. I will check if it is possible to compile these dependencies with multicore usage enabled. If I succeed, I will let you know.

Abhishek

[Manuel Günther]

Dear Abhishek,

I just recently re-implemented the gridtk to allow to use multiple threads on the local machine instead of the SGE grid. I also updated the facereclib to use it.

Please check out the latest version of the facereclib and re-buildout. This should automatically download the required branch of the gridtk. Use the --grid local option to run your facereclib scripts. If you need more power, please change the corresponding configuration file under facereclib/confugirations/grid/local.py


Be aware that gridtk is under development and currently only a beta version. It is tested every night, but still there might be unexpected behavior. Please file a bug report under the gridtk package if you experience problems.

Bests
Manuel

[Abhishek Dutta]

Thank you manual for the update. I will try it for my future experiments.

Regards,
Abhishek