Mutable object in parallel loop

General Usage
1

Hello,

Let’s say that I have a type Foo which is mutable and assume that the construction of an instance of Foo is quite long. I also have a function set_state(foo::Foo, bar::Vector{Float64}).

Here is a sequential example of what I want to achieve

function average_value(foo::Foo, n::Int)
    total = 0
    for k in 1:n
        set_state(foo, rand(10))
        total += compute_value(foo)
    end
    total / n    
end

where compute_value initialize some internal variables to a given value, update them according to the randomly generated state and return the a function of those variables. This should work perfectly fine for sequential code since the variables are reset at each instance of the loop.

What happen if I use a parallel loop instead? That’s it, I run

function average_value(foo::Foo, n::Int)
    @everywhere total = 0
    @parallel for k in 1:n
        set_state(foo, rand(10))
        total += compute_value(foo)
    end
    total / n    
end

Do I need to copy foo to prevent it from being updated by multiple workers at the same time or is everything already taken care of by Julia?

2

Yes, you need to handle this.