Folks, I got this report on Numeric as included with MacPython (through the package manager) and it looks promising. But: I'm building Numeric simply by running setup.py, so in order to get the added performance Numeric's setup.py would need to be taught about veclib.
Is anyone willing to look into this?
On Sunday, September 14, 2003, at 09:35 PM, Alun Carr wrote:
Jack,
I would like to thank you for all your hard work in producing MacPython 2.3 for OS X. It's superb.
One point to note: I think that you may have compiled the Numeric stuff from scratch. Apple supply hand-tuned BLAS, LAPACK, and FFT code in their vecLib framework. Despite the name, according to Apple's documentation this framework is suitable for both G3 and G4 processors, and it will automatically use vectorized code if it detects a G4.
From http://developer.apple.com/hardware/ve/quickstart.html:
If you are a developer who would like to make more use of AltiVec in your application, you should first explore the functionality that is available in Apple's vecLib.framework . This framework can be found in /System/Library/Frameworks on any MacOS X installation. There you will find many highly optimized routines for a diversity of tasks. There are single and double precision FFT's. Some of these are up to five times faster than FFT-W . There are also convolutions, 1D and 2D matrix operations and much, much more. MacOS X.2 (Jaguar) rounds this out with a full BLAS and LAPACK implementation in both single and double precision. These functions also work on G3 and earlier processors, meaning that you can call them safely regardless of what machine you are running on.
For future releases of Numeric for MacPython, it might be worth using vecLib, to (i) reduce the effort on your part, (ii) reduce the size of the distribution, and (iii) to use code which has been optimized by Apple for maximum performance.
Anyway, thanks again for your efforts, and please keep up the good work.
Best regards,
Alun
==
Dr Alun J. Carr Phone: +353-(0)1-716 1989 (Office) Mechanical Engineering Dept +353-(0)1-716 1752 (BRC) University College Dublin Fax: +353-(0)1-283 0534 Belfield Email: alun.j.carr@ucd.ie (UCD) Dublin 4 carraj@attglobal.net (Home) Ireland
-- Jack Jansen, Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma Goldman