# ParallelTable running on outermost index only

I need to run a simple ParallelTable:

ParallelTable[
{tab1[[i1]], tab2[[i2]], tab3[[i3]], tab4[[i4]],
fun[tab1[[i1]],tab2[[i2]],tab3[[i3]],tab4[[i4]]]
},
{i1, 1, n1}, {i2, 1, n2}, {i3, 1,n3}, {i4, 1, n4}
]


The computation, however, is parallelized only on the outermost index i1 and not on all of them. The problem is that I have more cores than n1 and so I'm not computing this table as fast as I had hoped. Is there a simple way to run on as many cores as possible without having to rewrite the table in a flattened version?

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Actually this looks like an excellent candidate for flattening. Do you really need the higher dimensional array in the output, or will a flat one do as well? (Sorry, I don't know the answer to your actual question. But this looks like something I would have flattened before parallelization even if I don't know about this limitation of ParallelTable. You can use Tuples to make the parameter list.) –  Szabolcs Jun 13 '12 at 13:32
Do you have a license for all of the cores? A standard installation runs on max 4 cores if I'm not mistaken. –  Sjoerd C. de Vries Jun 13 '12 at 13:37
the ni are generally all equal to 2 in the specific case i'm dealing with –  Valerio Jun 13 '12 at 13:50
@Szabolcs Could you please give me an example on how to use Tuples to run a flattened version of the table? thanks –  Valerio Jun 13 '12 at 13:52

If you don't need a high-dimensional tensor as the output (from the code it seems you don't, since you're including all parameters in each output), I recommend you use a flattened table instead. This will make sure that the available cores can be used optimally.

Tuples gives you an easy way to parallelize this calculation. Assuming that the length of tab1 is n1, etc.,

ParallelMap[Append[#, fun @@ #]&, Tuples[{tab1, tab2, tab3, tab4}]]


will do what you need.

I typically use this approach (though I like to define fun to take a list as one argument instead of a number of arguments).

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One solution that I can see is nesting a ParallelTable inside a Table.

Original code (I have four cores, so I let the loop index stop at 3 for this demo):

ParallelTable[Labeled[Framed[{i, j}], $KernelID], {i, 3}, {j, 6}]// TableForm  Indeed, only 3 cores have been used Table[ParallelTable[Labeled[Framed[{i, j}],$KernelID], {j, 6}], {i, 3}] // TableForm


Now all four are used.

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