Re: [eigen] Comparing notes on work by Igleberger et al. 2012

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On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 4:24 PM, Rhys Ulerich <rhys.ulerich@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I noticed Blaze on the NA Digest list [1] on the NA Digest list, read

I noticed it too.

> the associated paper [2], and wondered if I could compare my takeaway
> knowledge with anyone else familiar with both Blaze and Eigen:
>
> 1) At the time of writing, Blaze shows faster dgemm than Eigen3
> because they simply defer to the MKL.  This is moot as Eigen 3.1
> allows use of the MKL as well.

Partly. Blaze is also able to exploit AVX instruction (so a
theoretical x2 compared to SSE), however Blaze suffers from a HUGE
shortcoming: data are assumed to be perfectly aligned, including
inside a matrix. For instance, a row-major matrix is padded with empty
space such that each row is aligned. The extra space *must* be filled
with zeros and nothing else because they are exploited during some
computations... As a consequence, Blaze does not has any notion of
sub-matrices or the like, cannot map external data, etc. One cannot
even write a LU decomposition on top of Blaze. In other word, it is
not usable at all. This is also unfair regarding the benchmarks
because they are comparing Blaze with perfectly aligned matrices to
Eigen or MKL with packed and unaligned matrices.

> 2) Blaze shows faster performance on A*B*v for A and B matrices
> because they don't honor order of operations and their expression
> templates treat it as A*(B*v).  This is moot as I can simply write
> A*(B*v) in Eigen.

Exactly, though we plane to do the same (and more) once the evaluators
finalized.

> 3) Blaze does show some convincingly better results for mixed
> dense/sparse operations.

Indeed, compressed sparse representations offers very little room for
optimizing basic operations.

gael.

>
> Thanks,
> Rhys
>
> [1] http://www.netlib.org/na-digest-html/12/v12n35.html#1
> [2] http://dx.doi.org/10.1137/110830125
>
>



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