[SciPy-user] scipy and blitz

[nicky van foreest]

Dear all,

After running laplace.py (a part of the scipy performance tutorial) I
get the following result:

 chuck~/tmp/perfpy> python laplace.py
 Doing 100 iterations on a 500x500 grid
 numeric took 3.35 seconds
 blitz took 8.61 seconds
 inline took 7.84 seconds
 fastinline took 0.75 seconds
 fortran took 0.42 seconds
 pyrex took 0.73 seconds

whereas the results on  http://www.scipy.org/PerformancePython give this:

 Numeric 29.3
 Blitz 9.5
 Inline 4.3
 Fast Inline 2.3
 Python/Fortran 2.9
 Pyrex 2.5

Does anybody have clue about why the blitz code works slower on my
machine than numpy?

I searched the web on what might be a reason and came across a mail by
Travis Oliphant. He also experiences relatively slow behavior of
blitz, but after recompiling python with debugging info blitz worked
well again. Thus, I checked my installation of python, but it is
compiled without debugging info. As a further check I contacted the
scipy maintainer of gentoo (see cc). He gets the same relative
performance as I do.

Thanks for any info.

bye

Nicky