Boost Random and OpenMP

Question

I\'m getting a \"bus error\" from an OpenMP parallel section of code. I recreated a simple version of my problem below. The code essentially makes many calls to the function

Answer 1

I think the most convenient solution would involve a thread_local RNG and a seeding that involves the thread ID as a unique number for each thread, for example, you can do a XOR between the system time and the thread-id to seed the RNG. Something along the lines of (using C++11):

#include 
#include 

#include 
#include 

boost::random::mt19937& get_rng_engine() {
  thread_local boost::random::mt19937 eng(
    reinterpret_cast(std::time(NULL)) ^ std::this_thread::get_id());
  return eng;
};

(NOTE: you can also use if you are going to use C++11)

If you can't use C++11 then you can use boost::thread instead to have a similar behavior, see the Boost page on thread-local storage too.