Thread Subject:

Parfor not executing if statements

Hi,
I've been trying to use a parfor on this piece of code but it never executes the if-statements. When the lopp ends, I can't find the net1, net2,... variables in the workspace.

 parfor lag =1:max_lags
                        pad = zeros(N,lag);
                        %pad the data for shifted correlation
                        d1 = [pad data_subset];
                        d2 = [data_subset pad];
                        nn1 = repmat(rownorm(d1),1,size(d1,2)); %norm of each row
                        nn2 = repmat(rownorm(d1),1,size(d2,2));
                        %normalize each row such that its norm equals 1
                        d1 = d1 ./ nn1;
                        d2 = d2 ./ nn2;
                        
                        %this is bad but so far it's the only way I can use
                        %a parfor
                        if lag == 1
                            net6 = triu(abs(d1*d2'));
                            net8 = triu(abs(d2*d1'));
                        elseif lag == 2
                            net5 = triu(abs(d1*d2'));
                            net9 = triu(abs(d2*d1'));
                        elseif lag == 3
                            net4 = triu(abs(d1*d2'));
                            net10 = triu(abs(d2*d1'));
                        elseif lag ==4
                            net3 = triu(abs(d1*d2'));
                            net11 = triu(abs(d2*d1'));
                        elseif lag==5
                            net2 = triu(abs(d1*d2'));
                            net12 = triu(abs(d2*d1'));
                        elseif lag==6
                            net1 = triu(abs(d1*d2'));
                            net13 = triu(abs(d2*d1'));
                        end
    end %end parfor

The reason I use this if statements is because the parfor wouldn't let stick the results in a 3-D matrix or a cell array.
Any idea why the if statements are not being executed?
Thank you.
James

"James " <jfaghm@googlemail.com> writes:

> I've been trying to use a parfor on this piece of code but it never
> executes the if-statements. When the lopp ends, I can't find the net1,
> net2,... variables in the workspace. [...]

Your code essentially comes down to this:

parfor ii=1:2
  if ii == 1
    x1 = 1;
  else
    x2 = 2;
  end
end

and you observe that you don't get x1 and x2 in your workspace after the
loop ends. This is expected - the statements are executed, but x1 and x2
are not output variables of the loop.

For a variable to be an output from a PARFOR loop, it must either be
"sliced" or a "reduction". Sliced basically means that it's an array
where one dimension is indexed using only the loop variable, and the
other indexing expressions are constant. An example of a reduction is
where a sum is being accumulated in the loop. Like so:

x = zeros(N);
y = 0;
parfor ii=1:N
  x(ii, :) = rand(1, N); % x is "sliced"
  y = y + max(x(ii,:)); % y is a "reduction"
end

You can slice have sliced cell arrays as outputs from a PARFOR loop,
like so:

x = cell(1, N);
parfor ii=1:N
  if ii < 3
    x{ii} = rand(3);
  else
    x{ii} = rand(ii);
  end
end

Cheers,

Edric.