[Numpy-discussion] GSoC project: draft of proposal

[Julian Taylor]

On 12.03.2014 17:52, Leo Mao wrote:
> Hi,
> The attachment is my draft of proposal. The project is "vector math
> library integration".
> I think I need some feedback to make it solider.
> Any comment will be appreciated.
> Thanks in advance.
> 

hi,
I finally had some time too properly look at your proposal, here are my
comments.

First of all I hope you are aware this is a very challenging project as
you will have to deal with issues of several different areas: build
systems, portability, low level performance, numerical issues, testing
and the in some places quite daunting numpy codebase.
I do fear that it might be too much for a first year student.

Your proposal is lacking some information on your experiences. Are you
already familiar with vectorization via SIMD? While the goal of this
project is partly to avoid writing more vector code in NumPy it is still
very useful if you are familiar with how it works.
If you have no experience maybe add some time to learning the basics to
the schedule.

The numerical accuracy of the vector library needs to be evaluated, I
suspect that this might be the biggest roadblock in adding support by
default. The performance of the library over different value ranges also
needs to investigated.

What kind of hardware do you have at your disposal?
SIMD vectorization performance is very hardware dependent, you probably
want at least a intel sandy bridge or AMD bulldozer type cpu to get the
most out of the library, those CPUs have the newish AVX SIMD instructions.


While I think your schedule is already packed, another point you could
add if you have extra time is extending the existing SSE vectorized code
in numpy to AVX if the vector library does not provide an equivalent
(e.g. probably the boolean stuff)
The runtime feature detection vector libraries provide can be very
useful for this.

Regards,
Julian Taylor