[Numpy-discussion] Numpy Benchmarking

[Dennis V. Perepelitsa]

Hi, all.

I've run some benchmarks comparing the performance of scipy, numpy, 
Numeric and numarray vs. MATLAB. There's also the beginnings of a 
benchmark framework included. The results are online at:

     http://web.mit.edu/jonas/www/bench/

They were produced on a Thinkpad T42 with an Intel Pentium M 1.7GHz 
processor running Ubuntu Dapper Drake (6.06). All the languages/packages 
were built from source, and, in the case of numpy and scipy, linked to 
ATLAS. Each datapoint represents the arithmetic mean of ten trials.

The results have some interesting implications. For example, numpy and 
scipy perform approximately the same except when it comes to matrix 
inversion, MATLAB beats out all the Python packages when it comes to 
matrix addition, and numpy seems to be beaten by its predecessors in some 
cases. Why is this the case? What are some other, additional benchmarks I 
could try?

Dennis V. Perepelitsa
MIT Class of 2008, Course VIII and XVIII-C
Picower Institute for Learning and Memory