Performance of RevMedia on matrix diagonalization

Piero Ugliengo piero.ugliengo at gmail.com
Thu Aug 27 09:45:16 EDT 2009


Dear Mark, thanks a lot for the advise. Things like 1.0 istead of 1 were
just my ignorance of the language.On the other hand I thought that the
syntax a[i][j] instead of the more readable a[i,j] was imposed by the
language.
Cheers
Piero

2009/8/27 Mark Smith <lists at futilism.com>

> I saw this over on the forum (the diagonalisation takes about twenty
> seconds on my MacBookPro with rev enterprise), and two things occur to me.
>
> 'Arrays' in revolution are actually hash tables, so are very nice for
> random access to elements, but will not be as efficient for sequential
> access as more traditional, fixed width arrays in other languages.
> I suspect that this is the main speed issue with your eigen function.
>
> Secondly, I understand that all numbers in revolution (which is an un-typed
> language) are floats - though there may be conversions to and from integers
> going on in the engine. I doubt that this will have any effect on the speed
> of your functions, but it's probably unneccessary to write '1.0' or '1.' -
> simply '1' will do, I think.
>
> I think that using the a[i][j] approach instead of a[i,j] might get you
> maybe 10% more speed, but then you'd have to convert to a[i,j] anyway in
> order to use the built in matrixmultiply and transpose functions (this
> should be updated, I'd have thought).
>
> My maths is nowhere near good enough to suggest mathematical optimisations
> (which you might not want for educational purposes, anyway) and I can't see
> any obvious optimisations to make in the code you've written.
>
> Hopefully, someone here will be able to be more helpful, but this may be
> one of those things that revolution simply isn't best suited for :(
>
> Best,
>
> Mark Smith
>
>
>
> On 27 Aug 2009, at 08:16, Piero Ugliengo wrote:
>
>  I am completely new to Revolution. I have downloaded the RevMedia alpha
>> version and played a bit with it. I was impressed by how fast I was able
>> to
>> port a little VB6 code to RevMedia. This code diagonalizes a symmetric
>> matrix using the Jacobi algorithm. I checked against the VB6 code and I
>> got
>> exactly the same results in the same number of iterations so that numerics
>> is the same. However the RevMedia code is at least one order of magnitude
>> slower than the VB6 one. For instance a 50x50 matrix is diagonalized in a
>> couple of seconds in VB6 and it tooks more than a minute on RevMedia. I
>> know
>> that RevMedia is not meant for numerical intensive calculations; however,
>> I
>> would like to use it in a scientific teaching context so some power is
>> needed. I wonder if anybody much expert than me can try the code using the
>> most powerful Revolution Studio and if there is a clever way to deal with
>> matrix algebra.
>> The link to download the rev script is here:
>> http://sites.google.com/site/pierougliengo/download-1/test.rev
>> ?attredirects=0
>>
>> <http://sites.google.com/site/pierougliengo/download-1/test.rev
>> ?attredirects=0>One
>> can set the size of the matrix in the onmouse routine.
>> Thanks a lot
>> _________________
>> Piero Ugliengo
>>
>> --
>> Prof. Piero Ugliengo
>> University of Torino
>> Dip. Chimica IFM,  Via P. Giuria, 7 I-10125 Torino
>> ITALY
>> Phone: +39-011-670.4596
>> FAX:   +39-011-236.4596
>> E-mail:  piero.ugliengo at unito.it
>> Home page:
>> http://web086.unito.it/cgi-bin/chimifm/persone.pl/Show
>> ?_id=ugliengo&sort=DEFAULT&search=&hits=70
>> MOLDRAW: http://www.moldraw.unito.it
>> _______________________________________________
>> use-revolution mailing list
>> use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
>> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your
>> subscription preferences:
>> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> use-revolution mailing list
> use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your
> subscription preferences:
> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
>



-- 
Prof. Piero Ugliengo
University of Torino
Dip. Chimica IFM,  Via P. Giuria, 7 I-10125 Torino
ITALY
Phone: +39-011-670.4596
FAX:   +39-011-236.4596
E-mail:  piero.ugliengo at unito.it
Home page:
http://web086.unito.it/cgi-bin/chimifm/persone.pl/Show?_id=ugliengo&sort=DEFAULT&search=&hits=70
MOLDRAW: http://www.moldraw.unito.it



More information about the use-livecode mailing list