Re: Dependence of precision on execution speed of Inverse
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg81602] Re: Dependence of precision on execution speed of Inverse
- From: danl at wolfram.com
- Date: Sat, 29 Sep 2007 02:24:30 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <fdi5li$q8j$1@smc.vnet.net>
On Sep 28, 1:06 am, "Andrew Moylan" <andrew.j.moy... at gmail.com> wrote:
> m1=RandomReal[1,{50,50}];
> m2=SetPrecision[m1,14];
> Do[Inverse[m1];,{1500}]//Timing
> Do[Inverse[m2];,{10}]//Timing
>
> On my machine, both Timing results are about the same, indicating that
> Inverse (of 50x50 matrices) is about 150 times faster for machine-precision
> numbers than for arbitrary precision numbers (of precision ~14). This factor
> of 150 seems large. Does Mathematica employ an Inverse algorithm that is
> optimised for Mathematica's arbitrary-precision numbers?
>
> Notes:
> * Changing the precision of m2 from 14 to e.g. 17 makes little difference.
> * Calling Developer`FromPackedArray[] on m1 makes little difference.
> * Calling LinearSolve on Inverse yields somewhat different results, but
> still shows a difference in execution time of a factor of order 100.
Your m1 is a packed array of machine numbers. In contrast, m2 uses
software-implemented arbitrary precision approximate numbers. All this
you knew; I'm just summarizing the situation.
When you take Inverse[m1] you are using, under the hood, Lapack with
optimized BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines) code. With arbitrary
precision, even set to a low value, there is no packing, hence no
locality of reference for purposes of optimizing any sort of BLAS.
That alone would force it to be much slower. Add to it the overhead of
software implementation of the underlying arithmetic and you begin to
see why it is so much the worse in speed.
Actually if you compare with direct use of Dot you will see that
Inverse behaves etter, relatively speaking, for the arbitrary
precision matrix case. I'll set up a slightly different example.
m1 = RandomReal[1,{100,100}];
m2 = SetPrecision[m1,14];
m1trans = Transpose[m1];
m2trans = Transpose[m2];
In[39]:= Timing[Do [m1.m1, {1000}];]
Out[39]= {0.456028, Null}
In[40]:= Timing[Do [m2.m2, {2}];]
Out[40]= {2.59616, Null}
So the machine arithmetic case was perhaps 3000 times faster. But we
have internal code for handling dot products using fixed precision and
thus bypassing issues of precision estimation speed. The test below
shows a factor of 5 or so improvement over use of System context Dot.
In[55]:= Timing[Do[
LinearAlgebra`BLAS`GEMM["N", "N", 1, m2, m2, 0, mat], {10}]]
Out[55]= {2.67617, Null}
Beyond this, arbitrary precision Inverse is clearly gaining another
factor of three or so relative to the machine arithmetic version,
though offhand I know not how.
All this said, there may be ways we could improve further on
efficiency of the BLAS variants for arbitrary precision arithmetic. So
I do not know whether the factor of 150 is higher than need be.
Daniel Lichtblau
Wolfram Research