[Numpy-discussion] Numpy Benchmarking

[Travis Oliphant]

Keith Goodman wrote:
> On 6/27/06, Dennis V. Perepelitsa <dvp at mit.edu> wrote:
>
>   
>> I've run some benchmarks comparing the performance of scipy, numpy,
>> Numeric and numarray vs. MATLAB.
>>     
>
> I enjoyed looking at the results.
>
> The most interesting result, for me, was that inverting a matrix is
> much faster in scipy than numpy. How can that be? I would have guessed
> that numpy handled the inversion for scipy since numpy is the core.
>
> The two calls were scipy.linalg.inv(m) and numpy.linalg.inv(m).
>   
NumPy uses Numeric's old wrapper to lapack algorithms. 

SciPy uses it's own f2py-generated wrapper (it doesn't rely on the NumPy 
wrapper).

The numpy.dual library exists so you can use the SciPy calls if the 
person has SciPy installed or the NumPy ones otherwise.  It exists 
precisely for the purpose of seamlessly taking advantage of 
algorithms/interfaces that exist in NumPy but  are improved in SciPy.


-Travis