[Xapian-devel] Considering Parallel computing for Letor

Olly Betts
Wed, 19 Mar 2014 10:59:43 -0000

On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 10:51:24AM +0100, Parth Gupta
wrote:
> Parallel computing is definitely an interest of the xapian-letor project
> but you might have noticed from this year's project idea page, this
years
> focus is to sort out the existing API first and then on top of it adding a
> feature selection algorithm.

Yeah, the focus here really does need to be on producing a using
xapian-letor module.  A super-fast, ultra-parallel module with the same
API issues, thin documentation and complete lack of test coverage would
not be a step forwards.

> We would welcome your proposal and your proposal can be sorting out the
> letor API and on top of it making it parallel (replacing the feature
> selection algorithm).

If you can fit a project that makes a usable xapian-letor and then
works on making it more parallel into 13 weeks, I'm also OK with that.

As I said on IRC earlier, I think exploiting multiple cores would be
more widely useful than GPU stuff - almost everything new has multiple
cores these days, but servers and VMs don't generally have a powerful
GPU available.

Cheers,
    Olly