Re: speed up calculation suggestions

On Nov 13, 7:17 pm, rleav...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
I am an actuary and not a system professional and so please bear with
me. We use Fortran for some or our calculations and are being hampered
by long calculation times. There is nothing fancy in the code... I
process many millions of records from text files through some fairly
simple calculations, and write out the results. I want to speed up
this process, but am really not sure where to devote my efforts. I
have a new (dual core) windows XP machine with F95 compiled by
absoft. (I think version 7.5). I do not have much system support and
not too much time for experimentation, but am willing to tinker a
little. I am interested in other's thoughts.

Options:

1. Optimize my code: I am not sure what this means... It is pretty
stripped down now.
2 Get an updated compiler (any suggestions?)
3 Switch to Linux
4. Vectorize my code and use multiple processors (not sure how hard
this is).
5. Upgrade my computer (are some CPU's better at computation than
others?)
6. Other suggestions?

Of course, I do several of things, but really want help deciding what
will give me the biggest improvement for the least effort.

Thanks, Rick

How long does your program take to run? How much time is spent in
input, calculation and output? Are there multiple input files? Are you
reading them sequentially? Is there a relationship between data items
in different files?

Do you need to process all of the input data? Would it help to extract
some of the input data to a temporary imput file?

There are any number of ways to speed up programs - only some of them
are specific to Fortran.

I doubt that going to unformatted files from formatted files will do
you much good. The same for changing computers, compilers or operating
systems. If you want a big "payoff", find a better way to solve your
problem.

[The last time I ran into a program that was I/O bound was on a
386sx-25 computer where the rate limiting step was a dot matrix
printer used for output! :-).]




.

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