Dynare parallel on macOS Catalina

Step 1: Configuration file

The manual has a dedicated section on how to set up a configuration file for Dynare. We will cover a basic use case, i.e. running stuff in parallel on a local notebook or desktop computer or server, i.e. on localhost.

Create a new file with a text editor or MATLAB’s script editor and call it, for example, myconf.

In this file, we need to specify some settings to identify our machine and number of cores to use. Here is an example file:

[cluster]
Name = Local
Members = n1

[node]
Name = n1
ComputerName = localhost
CPUnbr = 4
NumberOfThreadsPerJob = 1
MatlabOctavePath=/Applications/MATLAB_R2020a.app/bin/matlab

As we have only one machine, our cluster contains only one member n1. For each member, we need to specify options in the node section. The name must correspond to the Members declared above. We don’t use a remote machine, so we select localhost . The most important setting is CPUnbr which corresponds to the number of cores you have. You can also (optionally) set the NumberOfThreadsPerJob to a number. For instance, on our university cluster (running CentOS Linux) I usually run 8 MCMC chains in parallel by using the following configuration file (note that 72/9=8):

[cluster]
Name = Local
Members = n1

[node]
Name = n1
ComputerName = localhost
CPUnbr = 72
NumberOfThreadsPerJob = 9

Note that for macOS, it is important to specify

Step 2: Running dynare parallel

Now we should first test our configuration file by calling:

dynare mymodel parallel_test confile=myconf

If everything is okay, we can actually do the parallel estimation by calling:

dynare mymodel parallel confile=myconf

Another hint: If you always use the same configuration file, you can copy your myconf file to /Users/wmutschl and rename it to .dynare (note that this becomes a hidden file). Then you can omit the conffile argument to the call above. Note, however, that the conffile option is more general and flexible.