How do you break out of parallel loops? ParallelBreak - parallel-processing

Question

in the following snippet, if you replace Do by ParallelDo, it will evaluate by a factor of 3 SLOWER, because now the loop will be broken in only ONE of the two kernels.
ParallelEvaluate[NN = 10070];
SetSharedVariable[res]
Module[{a, b, c},
Do[
c = NN - a - b;
If[a a + b b == c c, res = a b c; Break[]]
, {a, 1, NN}, {b, a + 1, NN}
];
res
] // AbsoluteTiming
Calling ParallelAbort would solve the issue, but it's forbidden. What else is there?

Answer 1

You need to have a way for each iteration to tell
all other iterations that the answer has been found.
I modelled this with a "quit" flag, intially set
to false, that is set to true when any iteration
decides to finish. Each iteration likewise has
to check the exit condition.
My Mathematica is 15 years rusty, and I haven't
seen the Parallelxxx forms before, but a good guess
at how the loop should change is the following
variation on your code:
ParallelEvaluate[NN = 10070];
SetSharedVariable[res,quit]
Module[{a, b, c},
quit=false;
Do[ c = NN - a - b;
If[quit, Break[]];
If[ a a + b b == c c, quit=true; res = a b c; Break[]],
{a, 1, NN}, {b, a + 1, NN}
];
res
] // AbsoluteTiming
The extra If slows down the loop somewhat, but thats the price of
synchronization.
I suspect that the amount
of work you are doing in each iteration is already pretty small
compared to the cost of executing each iteration in parallel,
so this loop is probably inefficient and you may not get
any real value from the Do Parallel.
If you dont, then you can make each Do iteration operate on several values
of a and b (e.g., use {a, 1, NN, 10} and similarly for b for each
iteration and handle the 10-wide subrange as a subloop inside
each parallel iteration).to keep the quit-test exit overhead small in comparison
to the work done in each loop body.
Recode exercise left for the reader.
Your code has another problem: there's a race condition in setting
res. Under ceratin circumstances, two iterations could both decide to set res.
If you don't care which answer is produced, and the store to res is "atomic",
this is fine. If res were a more complicated data structure, and updating
it took multiple Mathematica statements, you'd surely have a data race
and your loop would produce bad results once in a great while and it
would be very hard to debug. You ideally need some kind of atomic
test to protect the exit condition. I don't know what that is in MMa,
so you'll have to look it up, but I imagine an "atomic[...]" form
that insists its body is executged by only one of the many parallel threads.
(Perhaps MMa has a semaphore that you can use to implement atomic].
If so, your code should then look like this:
ParallelEvaluate[NN = 10070];
SetSharedVariable[res,quit]
Module[{a, b, c},
quit=false;
Do[ c = NN - a - b;
If[quit, Break[]];
If[ a a + b b == c c,
atomic[If[not[quit]; quit=true; res = a b c;]; Break[]],
{a, 1, NN}, {b, a + 1, NN}
];
res
] // AbsoluteTiming