[Numpy-discussion] Openmp support (was numpy's future (1.1 and beyond): which direction(s) ?)

[Travis E. Oliphant]

James Philbin wrote:
> Personally, I think that the time would be better spent optimizing
> routines for single-threaded code and relying on BLAS and LAPACK
> libraries to use multiple cores for more complex calculations. In
> particular, doing some basic loop unrolling and SSE versions of the
> ufuncs would be beneficial. I have some experience writing SSE code
> using intrinsics and would be happy to give it a shot if people tell
> me what functions I should focus on.
>
>   
Fabulous!   This is on my Project List of todo items for NumPy.  See 
http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/numpy/wiki/ProjectIdeas I should spend 
some time refactoring the ufunc loops so that the templating does not 
get in the way of doing this on a case by case basis.

1) You should focus on the math operations:  add, subtract, multiply, 
divide, and so forth.
2) Then for "combined operations" we should expose the functionality at 
a high-level.  So, that somebody could write code to take advantage of it. 

It would be easiest to use intrinsics which would then work for AMD, 
Intel, on multiple compilers.

-Travis O.