[Numpy-discussion] array.sum() slower than expected along some array axes?

[Charles R Harris]

On 2/3/07, Charles R Harris <charlesr.harris@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 2/3/07, Stephen Simmons <mail@stevesimmons.com> wrote:
> >
> >  Hi,
> >
> > Does anyone know why there is an order of magnitude difference
> > in the speed of numpy's array.sum() function depending on the axis
> > of the matrix summed?
> >
> > To see this, import numpy and create a big array with two rows:
> >    >>> import numpy
> >    >>> a = numpy.ones([2,1000000], 'f4')
> >
> > Then using ipython's timeit function:
> >                                                   Time (ms)
> >    sum(a)                                           20
> >    a.sum()                                           9
> >    a.sum(axis=1)                                     9
> >    a.sum(axis=0)                                   159
> >    numpy.dot(numpy.ones(a.shape[0], a.dtype), a)    15
> >
> > This last one using a dot product is functionally equivalent
> > to a.sum(axis=0), suggesting that the slowdown is due to how
> > indexing is implemented in array.sum().
> >
>
> In this case it is expected. There are inner and outer loops, in the slow
> case the inner loop with its extra code is called 1000000 times, in the fast
> case, twice. On the other hand, note this:
>
> In [10]: timeit a[0,:] + a[1,:]
> 100 loops, best of 3: 19.7 ms per loop
>
>
> Which has only one loop. Caching could also be a problem, but in this case
> it is dominated by loop overhead.
>

PS, I think this indicate that the code would run faster in this case if it
accumulated along the last axis, one at a time for each leading index. I
suspect that the current implementation accumulates down the first axis,
then repeats for each of the last indices. This shows that rearranging the
way the accumulation is done could be a big gain, especially if the largest
axis is chosen.

Chuck

Chuck
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://projects.scipy.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/attachments/20070203/25ca667b/attachment.html