When making many maps (http://yetanothermathprogrammingconsultant.blogspot.com/2014/01/maps-from-gams.html) it may make sense to try to exploit multiple cores. I have 4 on my laptop. It came with hyper-threading turned on so it looks like the machine has 8 cpus:
In R there is a nice parallel foreach construct (see: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/doParallel/vignettes/gettingstartedParallel.pdf). As each map is independent of each other, this offers an obvious way of parallelizing the generation of many maps. The results are quite good:
Serial : Elapsed time: 271.74 seconds for 84 maps
2 threads: Elapsed time: 136.17 seconds for 84 maps
4 threads: Elapsed time: 86.63 seconds for 84 maps
8 threads: Elapsed time: 71.23 seconds for 84 maps
Notice that even going from 4 to 8 threads helps (I did not expect that; conjecture: this may be related to being able to do other useful work while doing disk I/O). In the 8 thread case we have a bunch of Rscript.exe processes running:
We can keep all cores quite busy:
