[Numpy-discussion] numpy ufuncs and COREPY - any info?

[Gregor Thalhammer]

dmitrey schrieb:
> hi all,
> has anyone already tried to compare using an ordinary numpy ufunc vs
> that one from corepy, first of all I mean the project
> http://socghop.appspot.com/student_project/show/google/gsoc2009/python/t124024628235
>
> It would be interesting to know what is speedup for (eg) vec ** 0.5 or
> (if it's possible - it isn't pure ufunc) numpy.dot(Matrix, vec). Or
> any another example.
>   
I have no experience with the mentioned CorePy, but recently I was 
playing around with accelerated ufuncs using Intels Math Kernel Library 
(MKL). These improvements are now part of the numexpr package 
http://code.google.com/p/numexpr/
Some remarks on possible speed improvements on recent Intel x86 processors.
1) basic arithmetic ufuncs (add, sub, mul, ...) in standard numpy are 
fast (SSE is used) and speed is limited by memory bandwidth.
2) the speed of many transcendental functions (exp, sin, cos, pow, ...) 
can be improved by _roughly_ a factor of five (single core) by using the 
MKL. Most of the improvements stem from using faster algorithms with a 
vectorized implementation. Note: the speed improvement depends on a 
_lot_ of other circumstances.
3) Improving performance by using multi cores is much more difficult. 
Only for sufficiently large (>1e5) arrays a significant speedup is 
possible. Where a speed gain is possible, the MKL uses several cores. 
Some experimentation showed that adding a few OpenMP constructs you 
could get a similar speedup with numpy.
4) numpy.dot uses optimized implementations.

Gregor