Parallel doseq for Clojure

Posted by andrew cooke on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by andrew cooke
Published on 2012-06-10T14:56:43Z Indexed on 2012/06/11 4:40 UTC
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I haven't used multithreading in Clojure at all so am unsure where to start.

I have a doseq whose body can run in parallel. What I'd like is for there always to be 3 threads running (leaving 1 core free) that evaluate the body in parallel until the range is exhausted. There's no shared state, nothing complicated - the equivalent of Python's multiprocessing would be just fine.

So something like:

(dopar 3 [i (range 100)]
  ; repeated 100 times in 3 parallel threads...
  ...)

Where should I start looking? Is there a command for this? A standard package? A good reference?

So far I have found pmap, and could use that (how do I restrict to 3 at a time? looks like it uses 32 at a time - no, source says 2 + number of processors), but it seems like this is a basic primitive that should already exist somewhere.

clarification: I really would like to control the number of threads. I have processes that are long-running and use a fair amount of memory, so creating a large number and hoping things work out OK isn't a good approach (example which uses a significant chunk available mem).

update: Starting to write a macro that does this, and I need a semaphore (or a mutex, or an atom i can wait on). Do semaphores exist in Clojure? Or should I use a ThreadPoolExecutor? It seems odd to have to pull so much in from Java - I thought parallel programming in Clojure was supposed to be easy... Maybe I am thinking about this completely the wrong way? Hmmm. Agents?

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