The HPGENSELECT Procedure

Computational Method: Multithreading

Threading refers to the organization of computational work into multiple tasks (processing units that can be scheduled by the operating system). A task is associated with a thread. Multithreading refers to the concurrent execution of threads. When multithreading is possible, substantial performance gains can be realized compared to sequential (single-threaded) execution.

The number of threads spawned by the HPGENSELECT procedure is determined by the number of CPUs on a machine and can be controlled in the following ways:

  • You can specify the number of CPUs in the CPUCOUNT= SAS system option. For example, if you specify the following statement, the HPGENSELECT procedure determines threading as if it executed on a system that has four CPUs, regardless of the actual CPU count: 

    options cpucount=4;

  • You can specify the NTHREADS= option in the PERFORMANCE statement to control the number of threads. This specification overrides the CPUCOUNT= system option. Specify NTHREADS=1 to force single-threaded execution.

The number of threads per machine is displayed in the "Dimensions" table, which is part of the default output. The HPGENSELECT procedure allocates one thread per CPU by default.

The tasks that are multithreaded by the HPGENSELECT procedure are primarily defined by dividing the data that are processed on a single machine among the threads—that is, the HPGENSELECT procedure implements multithreading through a data-parallel model. For example, if the input data set has 1,000 observations and PROC HPGENSELECT is running with four threads, then 250 observations are associated with each thread. All operations that require access to the data are then multithreaded. These operations include the following:

  • variable levelization

  • effect levelization

  • formation of the initial crossproducts matrix

  • formation of approximate Hessian matrices for candidate evaluation during model selection

  • objective function calculation

  • gradient calculation

  • Hessian calculation

  • scoring of observations

In addition, operations on matrices such as sweeps can be multithreaded provided that the matrices are of sufficient size to realize performance benefits from managing multiple threads for the particular matrix operation.