bug #466: better fix for the race condition: this new patch add an initParallel()

function which must be called at the initialization time of any multi-threaded
application calling Eigen from multiple threads.

1 files changed, 46 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/doc/TopicMultithreading.dox b/doc/TopicMultithreading.dox
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..f7d082668
--- /dev/null
+++ b/doc/TopicMultithreading.dox
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+namespace Eigen {
+
+/** \page TopicMultiThreading Eigen and multi-threading
+
+\section TopicMultiThreading_MakingEigenMT Make Eigen run in parallel
+
+Some Eigen's algorithms can exploit the multiple cores present in your hardware. To this end, it is enough to enable OpenMP on your compiler, for instance:
+ * GCC: \c -fopenmp
+ * ICC: \c -openmp
+ * MSVC: check the respective option in the build properties.
+You can control the number of thread that will be used using either the OpenMP API or Eiegn's API using the following priority:
+\code
+ OMP_NUM_THREADS=n ./my_program
+ omp_set_num_threads(n);
+ Eigen::setNbThreads(n);
+\endcode
+Unless setNbThreads has been called, Eigen uses the number of threads specified by OpenMP. You can restore this bahavior by calling \code setNbThreads(0); \endcode
+You can query the number of threads that will be used with:
+\code
+n = Eigen::nbThreads(n);
+\endcode
+You can disable Eigen's multi threading at compile time by defining the EIGEN_DONT_PARALLELIZE preprocessor token.
+
+Currently, the following algorithms can make use of multi-threading:
+ * general matrix - matrix products
+ * PartialPivLU
+
+\section TopicMultiThreading_UsingEigenWithMT Using Eigen in a multi-threaded application
+
+In the case your own application is multithreaded, and multiple threads make calls to Eigen, then you have to initialize Eigen by calling the following routine \b before creating the threads:
+\code
+#include <Eigen/Core>
+
+int main(int argc, char** argv)
+{
+  Eigen::initParallel();
+  
+  ...
+}
+\endcode
+
+In the case your application is parallelized with OpenMP, you might want to disable Eigen's own parallization as detailed in the previous section.
+
+*/
+
+}