[Numpy-discussion] question about in-place operations

Massimo Di Pierro massimo.dipierro at gmail.com
Tue May 22 15:08:19 EDT 2012


This problem is linear so probably Ram IO bound. I do not think I  
would benefit much for multiple cores. But I will give it a try. In  
the short term this is good enough for me.


On May 22, 2012, at 1:57 PM, Francesc Alted wrote:

> On 5/22/12 8:47 PM, Dag Sverre Seljebotn wrote:
>> On 05/22/2012 04:54 PM, Massimo DiPierro wrote:
>>> For now I will be doing this:
>>>
>>> import numpy
>>> import time
>>>
>>> a=numpy.zeros(2000000)
>>> b=numpy.zeros(2000000)
>>> c=1.0
>>>
>>> # naive solution
>>> t0 = time.time()
>>> for i in xrange(len(a)):
>>>      a[i] += c*b[i]
>>> print time.time()-t0
>>>
>>> # possible solution
>>> n=100000
>>> t0 = time.time()
>>> for i in xrange(0,len(a),n):
>>>      a[i:i+n] += c*b[i:i+n]
>>> print time.time()-t0
>>>
>>> the second "possible" solution appears 1000x faster then the  
>>> former in my tests and uses little extra memory. It is only 2x  
>>> slower than b*=c.
>>>
>>> Any reason not to do it?
>> No, this is perfectly fine, you just manually did what numexpr does.
>
> Yeah.  You basically re-discovered the blocking technique.  For a more
> general example on how to apply the blocking technique with NumPy see
> the section "CPU vs Memory Benchmark" in:
>
> https://python.g-node.org/python-autumnschool-2010/materials/starving_cpus
>
> Of course numexpr has less overhead (and can use multiple cores) than
> using plain NumPy.
>
> -- 
> Francesc Alted
>
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