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Re: Matrix multiplication benchmark - Octave vs. Matlab


From: Mike Miller
Subject: Re: Matrix multiplication benchmark - Octave vs. Matlab
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2003 14:59:19 -0500 (CDT)

I just want to say that I'm very pleased, impressed and surprised that
Octave is as fast as, or even faster than, MATLAB.  Before I knew what a
BLAS was, I made some comparisons and thought Octave performed poorly in
comparison with MATLAB.  Of course, that was because I was using Octave
without the BLAS.  I didn't know until today that Octave with ATLAS BLAS
can actually outperform MATLAB.  I didn't expect to see that because
MATLAB has a lot of money behind it and they put a lot of effort into
optimization.

Also, our supercomputer team compiled Octave for me on our IBM SP
supercomputer (http://www.msi.umn.edu/sp/) and were supposed to use a
BLAS, maybe not the ATLAS BLAS.  However, MATLAB does the 1000x1000 matrix
multiplication more than twice as fast as Octave and it does
inv(rand(1000)) more than four times as fast as Octave.  Is there any way
to find out if a compiled octave binary was really compiled against a
BLAS?  Will ldd tell me anything?  How about "strings `which octave`"?  I
think our guys didn't use a BLAS, or maybe the BLAS on our SP is not as
efficient as ATLAS.

So, congrats to John and others on their success with Octave!

Mike



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