Hi, > Therefore, I assumed that a single threaded process used one virtual core on > a CPU. Is that > incorrect?
Yep. > Thanks for putting Spark on the map for me, I had never even heard of it, > but is it as fast as a C program? On a single core probably not, but it's much more scalable and could easily finish the quicker given enough cores/CPU. How many it would need I couldn’t guess at. But I done a little bit of Apache Spark programming and found it quite fast. On my laptop things like work out what are the most common words in the entire works of Shakespeare took 10 seconds or so including read and parsing the text. One other option on a single machine for fast number crunching is to use the GPU for calculations [1], but I’ve not played about with that. Justin 1. http://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-c-programming-guide/index.html
