Re: About octave performance...

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 9:48 AM, Francesco Riganti <address@hidden> wrote:
> Dear All,
> first of all, a very big "tank you" for this wonderful project. I have a
> little question: in the next feature of octave, it will be an
> improvement versus matlab performance?

The improvements are continuously being worked on.

> Actually, i think this is the most immediate problem to solve. Infact,
> despite the use of vectorization, matlab is more fast then octave. In my
> university, I would like to build a cluster system for octave using
> instead of matlab sofware. However, the not yet good performance of
> octave versus matlab, not encourage the cluster project. Can you tell me
> something about it?

Code optimization usually requires understanding what is going on
under the hood, so chances are that you are simply missing a good
hint.
Regarding the heavy numerics, especially linear algebra, Octave calls
external libraries to perform those, often the same libraries as
Matlab does. Matlab's interpreter now has a JIT compiler, which can
improve the speed of some m-file code a lot. However, I daresay that
Octave has significantly better support for compiled (C++) files via
its object-oriented internal API, so the demand for JIT in Octave is
not that high.

I have recently started a package on OctaveForge called "benchmarks"
which I hope many people shall contrubute into, and which aims to
allow also Octave vs. Matlab benchmarking.
If you want a particular feature to be faster, perhaps a good start
would be to create a benchmark so that people can test ideas.

If you can identify the bottlenecks in your code, you can also post it
to get help with optimization.


cheers



> Best Regards
>
> Francesco Riganti Fulginei
> Department of Applied Electronics
> Roma Tre University
> Rome
> _______________________________________________
> Help-octave mailing list
> address@hidden
> https://www.cae.wisc.edu/mailman/listinfo/help-octave
>



-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz