On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 2:26 AM, Dag Sverre Seljebotn
<d.s.seljebotn@astro.uio.no> wrote:
On 06/27/2011 05:55 PM, Mark Wiebe wrote:
> First I'd like to thank everyone for all the feedback you're providing,
> clearly this is an important topic to many people, and the discussion
> has helped clarify the ideas for me. I've renamed and updated the NEP,
> then placed it into the master NumPy repository so it has a more
> permanent home here:
>
>
https://github.com/numpy/numpy/blob/master/doc/neps/missing-data.rst
has the potential to change some of the memory/speed trade-offs here.
In the newest Intel-platform CPUs you can do 256-bit operations,
translating to a theoretical factor 8 speedup for in-cache single
precision data, and the instruction set is constructed for future
expansion possibilites to 512 or 1024 bit registers.
The ufuncs themselves need a good bit of refactoring to be able to use these kinds of instructions well. I'm definitely thinking about this kind of thing while designing/implementing.
I feel one should take care to not design oneself into a corner where
this can't (eventually) be leveraged.
1) The shuffle instructions takes a single byte as a control character
for moving around data in different ways in 128-bit registers. One could
probably implement fast IGNORE-style NA with a seperate mask using 1
byte per 16 bytes of data (with 4 or 8-byte elements). OTOH, I'm not
sure if 1 byte per element kind of mask would be that fast (but I don't
know much about this and haven't looked at the details).
This level of optimization, while important, is often dwarfed by the effects of cache. Because of the complexity of the system demanded by the functionality, I'm trying to favor simplicity and generality without precluding high performance.
2) The alternative "Parameterized Data Type Which Adds Additional Memory
for the NA Flag" would mean that contiguous arrays with NA's/IGNORE's
would not be subject to vector instructions, or create a mess of copying
in and out prior to operating on the data. This really seems like the
worst of all possibilites to me.
This one was suggested on the list, so I added it.
-Mark
(FWIW, my vote is in favour of both NA-using-NaN and
IGNORE-using-explicit-masks, and keep the two as entirely seperate
worlds to avoid confusion.)