The HPCORR Procedure

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 HPCORR procedure is determined by the number of CPUs on a machine and can be controlled in the following ways:

You can specify the CPU count with the CPUCOUNT= SAS system option. For example, if you specify the following statements, the HPCORR procedure schedules threads as if it executed on a system with four CPUs, regardless of the actual CPU count:
```
options cpucount=4;
```
You can specify the NTHREADS= option in the PERFORMANCE statement to determine the number of threads. This specification overrides the NOTHREADS system option. Specify NTHREADS=1 to force single-threaded execution.

The number of threads per machine is displayed in the “Performance Information” table, which is part of the default output. The HPCORR procedure allocates one thread per CPU.

The HPCORR procedure implements a data-parallel model. For example, if the input data set has 1,000 observations and you are running with four threads, then 250 observations are associated with each thread. All operations that require access to the data are then multithreaded.