[Rcpp-devel] R/Rcpp/RcppEigen Optimization WAS: NumericVector Double mismatch when indexing an array

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 23 October 2012 at 09:46, Rodney Sparapani wrote:
| On 09/25/2012 04:45 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
| >
| > I use and recommend ~/.R/Makevars for that --- as setting certain values at
| > the package level is very verboten ("non portable code" and all that) as far
| > as CRAN is concerned.
| >
| > Now, that's the "how do you" part.  As for "does it matter" that is a
| > different beast as -O2 (or better) is already the default for R on my systems
| > (running the vanilla Ubuntu packages based on my Debian packaging).
| >
| > Dirk
| >
| 
| Hi Dirk:
| 
| I hope this not too far off-topic.  I don't want to show my messy code,
| but I learned a lot about optimization on my own system which I assume
| would be useful to others.  I was comparing an MCMC sampler written in
| R with a line for line translation via inline/RcppEigen.
| 
| So, getting back to this discussion...  "The way" to do this is to
| optimize R from the get go and then Rcpp/RcppEigen/etc. inherit the
| appropriate switches.  And, as Dirk said, the RPM of R in the repo does
| have -O2 (and a bunch of other switches which I don't know anything
| about).  However, I found that R in the repo was no faster than my
| naive compilation of R from source which did not include -O2 (or any
| other black magic).
| 
| What gives?  What I found that does speed up the code dramatically
| is the -march switch.  I guess that can't be repo-ed because it is
| CPU dependent, right?  Here's the important settings that I used to
| compile R from source:

Using   -march=native   lets gcc pick the best one without you having to know
the label gcc may use.

That said, _distribution builds_ cannot use this as they will not know your
cpu, and need to provide code for all compatible platforms (eg all 'amd64').

But configuration and optimisation of R is (I fear) a little off-topic
here. Maybe try r-devel?

Dirk

| 
| CC="gcc"
| CFLAGS="-g -O2 -march=amdfam10"
| CXX="g++"
| CXXFLAGS="-g -O2 -march=amdfam10"
| 
| With these settings...
| 
| MCMC Code	Switches		Relative Time
| R		none or -O2		1.0
| RcppEigen	none or -O2		0.09
| R		-O2 -march=amdfam10	0.5
| RcppEigen	-O2 -march=amdfam10	0.013
| 
| -- 
| Rodney Sparapani, PhD  Center for Patient Care and Outcomes Research
| Sr. Biostatistician               http://www.mcw.edu/pcor
| 4 wheels good, 2 wheels better!   Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW)
| WWLD?:  What Would Lombardi Do?   Milwaukee, WI, USA

-- 
Dirk Eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com