Hi, On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 11:55 AM, Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:
On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 2:34 PM, Arink Verma <arinkverma@gmail.com> wrote:
Each ndarray does two mallocs, for the obj and buffer. These could be combined into 1 - just allocate the total size and do some pointer arithmetic, then set OWNDATA to false. So, that two mallocs has been mentioned in project introduction. I got that wrong.
On further thought/reading the code, it appears to be more complicated than that, actually.
It looks like (for a non-scalar array) we have 2 calls to PyMem_Malloc: 1 for the array object itself, and one for the shapes + strides. And, one call to regular-old malloc: for the data buffer.
(Mysteriously, shapes + strides together have 2*ndim elements, but to hold them we allocate a memory region sized to hold 3*ndim elements. I'm not sure why.)
And contrary to what I said earlier, this is about as optimized as it can be without breaking ABI. We need at least 2 calls to malloc/PyMem_Malloc, because the shapes+strides may need to be resized without affecting the much larger data area. But it's tempting to allocate the array object and the data buffer in a single memory region, like I suggested earlier. And this would ALMOST work. But, it turns out there is code out there which assumes (whether wisely or not) that you can swap around which data buffer a given PyArrayObject refers to (hi Theano!). And supporting this means that data buffers and PyArrayObjects need to be in separate memory regions.
Are you sure that Theano "swap" the data ptr of an ndarray? When we play with that, it is on a newly create ndarray. So a node in our graph, won't change the input ndarray structure. It will create a new ndarray structure with new shape/strides and pass a data ptr and we flag the new ndarray with own_data correctly to my knowledge. If Theano pose a problem here, I'll suggest that I fix Theano. But currently I don't see the problem. So if this make you change your mind about this optimization, tell me. I don't want Theano to prevent optimization in NumPy. Fred