Archive for October, 2013
One of my favourite parts of my job at The University of Manchester is the code optimisation service that my team provides to researchers there. We take code written in languages such as MATLAB, Python, Mathematica and R and attempt (usually successfully) to make them go faster. It’s sort of a cross between training and consultancy, is a lot of fun and we can help a relatively large number of people in a short time. It also turns out to be very useful to the researchers as some of my recent testimonials demonstrate.
Other researchers,however, need something more. They already have a nice piece of code with several users and a selection of papers. They also have a bucket-load of ideas about how to turn this nice code into something amazing. They have all this good stuff and yet they find that they are struggling to get their code to the next level. What these people need is some quality time with a team of research software engineers.
Enter the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI), an organisation that I have been fortunate enough to have a fellowship with throughout 2013. These guys are software-development ninjas, have extensive experience with working with academic researchers and, right now, they have an open call for projects. It’s free to apply and, if your application is successful, all of their services will be provided for free. If you’d like an idea of the sort of projects they work on, take a look at the extensive list of past projects.
So, if you are a UK-based researcher who has a software problem, and no one else can help, maybe you can hire* the SSI team.
*for free!
Links
From the wikipedia page on Division by Zero: “The IEEE 754 standard specifies that every floating point arithmetic operation, including division by zero, has a well-defined result”.
MATLAB supports this fully:
>> 1/0 ans = Inf >> 1/(-0) ans = -Inf >> 0/0 ans = NaN
Julia is almost there, but doesn’t handled the signed 0 correctly (This is using Version 0.2.0-prerelease+3768 on Windows)
julia> 1/0 Inf julia> 1/(-0) Inf julia> 0/0 NaN
Python throws an exception. (Python 2.7.5 using IPython shell)
In [4]: 1.0/0.0 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ZeroDivisionError Traceback (most recent call last) in () ----> 1 1.0/0.0 ZeroDivisionError: float division by zero In [5]: 1.0/(-0.0) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ZeroDivisionError Traceback (most recent call last) in () ----> 1 1.0/(-0.0) ZeroDivisionError: float division by zero In [6]: 0.0/0.0 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ZeroDivisionError Traceback (most recent call last) in () ----> 1 0.0/0.0 ZeroDivisionError: float division by zero
Update:
Julia does do things correctly, provided I make it clear that I am working with floating point numbers:
julia> 1.0/0.0 Inf julia> 1.0/(-0.0) -Inf julia> 0.0/0.0 NaN
I got a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 yesterday and, since I’m so interested in compute performance, I ran various benchmarks on it. Here are the results.
AnTuTu Benchmark Overall score was 35,637. The screenshot below shows the comparison, given by the App, between my device and the Samsung Galaxy note 2 (my previous phone).
Linpack Pro for Android – This was the app I used when I compared mobile phones to 1980s supercomputers back in 2010. My phone at the time, a HTC Hero, managed just 2.3 Megaflops. The Samsung Note 3, on the other hand, managed as much as 1074 Mflops. That’s quite an increase over the space of just 3 years! I found that the results of this app are quite inconsistent with individual runs ranging from 666 to 1074 Mflops.
RgbenchMM – I’ve written about this benchmark, developed by Rahul Garg, before. It gives more consistent results than Linkpack Pro and my Note 3 managed as much as 4471 Mflops!
Notes
- The device was plugged in to the mains at the time of performing the benchmarks. I rebooted the device after running each one.
- There are at least two types of Note 3 in circulation that I know of – a quad core and an octo-core. According to CPU-Z, mine has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad-core with a top speed of 2.27 Ghz.
- Samsung have been accused of benchmark cheating by some. See, for example, this post from The Register.