[Numpy-discussion] Numpy x Matlab: some synthetic benchmarks

[Andrew Straw]

Paulo J. S. Silva wrote:

>Em Qua, 2006-01-18 às 11:15 -0700, Travis Oliphant escreveu:
>
>  
>
>>Will you run these again with the latest SVN version of numpy.   I 
>>couldn't figure out why a copy was being made on transpose (because it 
>>shouldn't have been).  Then, I dug deep into the PyArray_FromAny code 
>>and found bad logic in when a copy was needed that was causing an 
>>inappropriate copy.
>>
>>I fixed that and now wonder how things will change.  Because presumably, 
>>the dotblas function should handle the situation now...
>>
>>    
>>
>
>Good work Travis :-)
>
>Tests    x.T*y   x*y.T     A*x     A*B   A.T*x    half    2in2
>
>Dimension: 5
>Array   0.9000  0.2400  0.2000  0.2600  0.7100  0.9400  1.1600
>Matrix  4.7800  1.5700  0.6200  0.7600  1.0600  3.0400  4.6500
>NumArr  3.2900  0.7400  0.6800  0.7800  8.4800  7.4200 11.6600
>Numeri  1.3300  0.3900  0.3100  0.4200  0.7900  0.6800  0.7600
>Matlab  1.88    0.44    0.41    0.35    0.37    1.20    0.98
>
>Dimension: 50
>Array   9.0000  2.1400  0.5500 18.9500  1.4100  4.2700  4.4500
>Matrix 48.7400  3.9200  1.0100 20.2000  1.8000  6.5000  8.1900
>NumArr 32.3900  2.6800  1.0000 18.9700 13.0300  8.6300 13.0700
>Numeri 13.1000  2.2600  0.6500 18.2700 10.1500  1.0400  3.2600
>Matlab 16.98    1.94    1.07   17.86    0.73    1.57    1.77
>
>Dimension: 500
>Array   1.1400  9.2300  2.0100 168.2700  2.1800  4.0200  4.2900
>Matrix  5.0300  9.3500  2.1500 167.5300  2.1700  4.1100  4.4200
>NumArr  3.4400  9.1000  2.1000 168.7100 21.8400  4.3900  5.8900
>Numeri  1.5800  9.2700  2.0700 167.5600 20.0500  3.4000  4.6800
>Matlab  2.09    6.07    2.17   169.45    2.10     2.56    3.06
>
>Note the 10-fold speed-up for higher dimensions :-)
>
>It looks like that now that numpy only looses to matlab in small
>dimensions. Probably, the problem is the creation of the object to
>represent the transposed object. Probably Matlab creation of objects is
>very lightweight (they only have matrices objects to deal with).
>Probably this phenomenon explains the behavior for the indexing
>operations too.
>
>Paulo
>
>
>  
>
Here's an idea Fernando and I have briefly talked about off-list, but 
which perhaps bears talking about here: Is there speed to be gained by 
an alternative, very simple, very optimized ndarray constructor? The 
idea would be a special-case constructor with very limited functionality 
designed purely for speed. It wouldn't support (m)any of the fantastic 
things Travis has done, but would be useful only in specialized use 
cases, such as creating indices.

I'm not familiar enough with what the normal constructor does to know if 
we could implement something, (in C, perhaps) that would do nothing but 
create a simple, contiguous array significantly faster than what is 
currently done. Or does the current constructor create a new instance 
about as fast as possible? I know Travis has optimized it, but it's a 
general purpose constructor, and I'm thinking these extra features may 
take some extra CPU cycles.

Cheers!
Andrew