| IDL vs Yorick? [message #32374] |
Sat, 05 October 2002 06:42  |
Ralf Flicker
Messages: 19
Registered: October 2001
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Junior Member |
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At the risk of reiterating an old debate (if there was one), I
would like to hear people's opinions about the open source
interpreted language called Yorick.
With RSI/Kodak's recent licensing policies and costs, Yorick's
attractive features are of course that it's open source and
available for all platforms. This provides in principle
unlimited portability. But if performance were found to be
similar or inferior to that of IDL I would of course stick to
IDL, so I recently started benchmarking Yorick versus IDL to see
if there was a reason for me personally to consider a switch to
Yorick. The preliminary results are thought provoking. The test
included:
1) defining 3 real and 1 complex double precision 512x512 arrays
of uniformly distributed random numbers
2) matrix multiplication of two real arrays
3) 20 FFTs of a complex array (using the fft_setup only once
in Yorick)
4) 20 "where" operations on complex array
The median time required for these computations on my computer
(600MHz, single cpu) after a handful of runs were (in seconds):
IDL Yorick
1 0.19 0.19
2 18.1 8.1
3 17.4 9.0
4 1.30 1.45
Total: 36.99 18.74
I had also intended to include a SVD in the test, but this
bugged out in Yorick for some reason (why? anyone?). In a second
test I also found the scaling law of the FFT (ideally ~ N^2log
N) to be slightly more benign in Yorick - I found an exponent of
2.5 in IDL and 2.35 in Yorick. I would appreciate thoughts and
comments on these numbers, and in particular I would be
interested to hear what other people have found in comparing IDL
and Yorick.
(googling on "Yorick+IDL" among the comp.* groups turned up a
few posts by Craig and Randall and other posters of this ng, and
Siegfried Gonzi posting in other groups - I hope you don't mind
rehashing the issue)
Input appreciated.
ralf
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