Stata-MP enables parallel processing, but this really kicks in only in estimation commands that are programmed to exploit it. A lot of the time we may have very simply repetitive tasks for Stata to do, that could be packaged for parallel operation very easily. This sort of work is often called embarrassingly parallel, and isn’t automatically catered for by Stata-MP.

The simplest situation is where the same work needs to be done multiple times, with some different details each time but no dependence whatsoever on the other parts. For instance we may have a loop where the work in the body takes a long time but doesn’t depend on the results of the other runs.

I came across this situation the other day: I have data created by running a simulation with different values of two key parameters, and I wanted to create graphs for each combination of the parameters (PNGs rather than Stata graphs, but that’s just a detail). So I wrote code like the following:
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