# 12.2 Using Multiple Threads in an Optimizer¶

The interior-point optimizers in MOSEK have been parallelized. This means that if you solve linear, quadratic, conic, or general convex optimization problem using the interior-point optimizer, you can take advantage of multiple CPU’s. By default MOSEK will automatically select the number of threads to be employed when solving the problem. However, the maximum number of threads employed can be changed by setting the parameter numThreads. This should never exceed the number of cores on the computer.

The speed-up obtained when using multiple threads is highly problem and hardware dependent, and consequently, it is advisable to compare single threaded and multi threaded performance for the given problem type to determine the optimal settings. For small problems, using multiple threads is not be worthwhile and may even be counter productive because of the additional coordination overhead. Therefore, it may be advantageous to disable multithreading using the parameter intpntMultiThread.

The interior-point optimizer parallelizes big tasks such linear algebra computations.