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(The problem has been narrowed down, and solved to a more simple one described at the end of the post beside UPDATE 3)

I'm doing some numerical work that takes quite a long time to run on my computer (which has 4 kernels). I got access to a cluster which has a Mathematica license that lets me use up to 80 kernels.

I made a few simple tests to find out how efficient it turns out to be. The first one being

ParallelTable[Pause[1]; i, {i, 1, 80}];// AbsoluteTiming
{1.171367, Null}

which tells me that all 80 kernels are running in parallel.

The next test I ran on my computer (not the cluster) was

Table[Sqrt[i], {i, 1, 10^6}]; // AbsoluteTiming
{11.3152, Null}

and

ParallelTable[Sqrt[i], {i, 1, 10^6}]; // AbsoluteTiming
{13.5914, Null}

which somehow tells me that 4 kernels in parallel run slower than 1 alone (maybe because it takes time to rejoin all information sent to the kernels?).

The same test using only 1 kernel from the cluster returns {13.661838, Null} from which I deduce that their processor is less powerful than mine. More interestingly, when I run all 80 kernels, I get {19.057895, Null}. I'm a bit disappointed with this result, but I'm sure that I'm missing a detail which explains this discrepancy.

Moreover, what I'm really interested is to create a table (using ParallelTable) of the function (for 0<=w<=1000 and 0<=b<=300; the options used give me an overall error of ~0.1% ,which is acceptable):

FAuR[w_, b_] := If[b == 0, 0, NIntegrate[1/u Sqrt[u^2 - (w/gAu)^2]
BesselJ[1, b Sqrt[u^2 - (w/gAu)^2]] FFAuR[u^2], {u, w/gAu,
40}, MinRecursion -> 3, MaxRecursion -> 100, 
WorkingPrecision -> 20, PrecisionGoal -> 10, 
AccuracyGoal -> Infinity] ] 

where gAu=19700/183 and FFAuR is an interpolated function which can be imported using the command FFAuR = << "FF-Au.m"(the file FF_Au.m can be downloaded from the link provided at the end).

Running this function on my computer I get

FAuR[1, 1] // AbsoluteTiming
NIntegrate::slwcon: Numerical integration converging too slowly; suspect one of the following: singularity, value of the integration is 0, highly oscillatory integrand, or WorkingPrecision too small. >>
{5.26011, 0.086004396132821223043}

while running it on the cluster I get

FAuR[1, 1] // AbsoluteTiming
NIntegrate::slwcon: Numerical integration converging too slowly; suspect one of the following: singularity, value of the integration is 0, highly oscillatory integrand, or WorkingPrecision too small. >>
{431.500101, 0.086004396132821223043}

It takes 80x more time to run on the cluster, what is happening? I was really hoping to have a great improvement and being able to get the most out of the cluster but these results are telling me otherwise. Any idea?

If anyone is interested in running the code, I uploaded the FF_Au.m (32 MB) file to my Google Drive:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3YRtWnRI0v2NUdSWnVOWVBUVXM

My computer is running Mathematica 11.0 on Windows 10, and the cluster is running Mathematica 10.0.

UPDATE 1 (21/08): I found out that the problem is caused by the interpolated function FFAuR. Integrating it numerically alone takes 435 seconds on the cluster and 5 seconds on my computer. However, plotting takes the same amount of time on both. Something might have changed inside NIntegrate when updating version 10 to 11.

UPDATE 2 (21/08): I narrowed the problem to a power. Evaluating the following code

NIntegrate[FFAuR[Power[x, 1]], {x, 0, 10}] // AbsoluteTiming
{0.990320, 0.353331}

takes 1s on the cluster and 1.1s on my on my computer. Squaring the argument of the function FFAuR somehow wrecks everything:

NIntegrate[FFAuR[Power[x, 2]], {x, 0, 10}] // AbsoluteTiming
{461.942459,0.580889}

It takes 435s to evaluate this code on the cluster while it takes only 3s on my PC! I still don't know why this happens.

UPDATE 3 (21/08): I found the solution. Mathematica 10.0 has a different symbolic preprocessing which makes the evaluation of NIntegrate take much longer. Adding Method->{"SymbolicProcessing" -> 0} at the end of NIntegrate solves the problem!

Thanks!

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  • $\begingroup$ The integration is a sequentially solved and, therefore, parallelization will not give you an acceleration of your job. It consumes too much time because the cluster has a bit weaker processors plus it needs time for data distribution to remote kernel (through LAN that is slowly). $\endgroup$
    – Rom38
    Aug 22, 2017 at 3:59
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    $\begingroup$ Please put solutions to your problem as answers, instead of editing your question. $\endgroup$ Aug 23, 2017 at 0:52
  • $\begingroup$ @J.M. Thanks for your suggestion $\endgroup$
    – Pierre
    Aug 23, 2017 at 18:57
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    $\begingroup$ @Pierre Also, feel free to accept your own answer. Then your question will not appear in the list of open questions (and no need to mark "solved" in the title then). $\endgroup$
    – anderstood
    Aug 23, 2017 at 19:14

1 Answer 1

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After spending some time isolating the problem, I found out that it was caused by the way symbolic preprocessing is done by NIntegrate algorithm in different Mathematica versions. The solution was to add Method -> {Automatic, "SymbolicProcessing" -> 0} at the end of NIntegrate. The post where I found this solution, from where you can read more about, is:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8456800/nintegrate-why-is-it-much-slower-in-mathematica-8-in-this-given-case

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