On 11 May 2012 12:13, Dag Sverre Seljebotn <d.s.seljeb...@astro.uio.no> wrote:
> (NumPy devs: I know, I get too many ideas. But this time I *really* believe
> in it, I think this is going to be *huge*. And if Mark F. likes it it's not
> going to be without manpower; and as his mentor I'd pitch in too here and
> there.)
>
> (Mark F.: I believe this is *very* relevant to your GSoC. I certainly don't
> want to micro-manage your GSoC, just have your take.)
>
> Travis, thank you very much for those good words in the "NA-mask
> interactions..." thread. It put most of my concerns away. If anybody is
> leaning towards for opaqueness because of its OOP purity, I want to refer to
> C++ and its walled-garden of ideological purity -- it has, what, 3-4
> different OOP array libraries, neither of which is able to out-compete the
> other. Meanwhile the rest of the world happily cooperates using pointers,
> strides, CSR and CSC.
>
> Now, there are limits to what you can do with strides and pointers. Noone's
> denying the need for more. In my mind that's an API where you can do
> fetch_block and put_block of cache-sized, N-dimensional blocks on an array;
> but it might be something slightly different.
>
> Here's what I'm asking: DO NOT simply keep extending ndarray and the NumPy C
> API to deal with this issue.
>
> What we need is duck-typing/polymorphism at the C level. If you keep
> extending ndarray and the NumPy C API, what we'll have is a one-to-many
> relationship: One provider of array technology, multiple consumers (with
> hooks, I'm sure, but all implementations of the hook concept in the NumPy
> world I've seen so far are a total disaster!).
>
> What I think we need instead is something like PEP 3118 for the "abstract"
> array that is only available block-wise with getters and setters. On the
> Cython list we've decided that what we want for CEP 1000 (for boxing
> callbacks etc.) is to extend PyTypeObject with our own fields; we could
> create CEP 1001 to solve this issue and make any Python object an exporter
> of "block-getter/setter-arrays" (better name needed).
>
> What would be exported is (of course) a simple vtable:
>
> typedef struct {
> int (*get_block)(void *ctx, ssize_t *upper_left, ssize_t *lower_right,
> ...);
> ...
> } block_getter_setter_array_vtable;
Interesting idea, I think I like it. So I suppose these blocks could
even be used in a sparse context, where it returns one-sized blocks
for un-surrounded elements. This means returned blocks can always be
variably sized, correct? So will each block be associated with an
index space? Otherwise, how do we know the element-wise
correspondence? Will there be a default element for missing
(unreturned) values?
Am I correct in assuming elements in returned blocks always return
elements in element-wise order? In case you manually have to block
other parts of an array (lets say it's stored in Fortran order), then
the variable sized block nature may be complicating the tiling
pattern.
> Let's please discuss the details *after* the fundamentals. But the reason I
> put void* there instead of PyObject* is that I hope this could be used
> beyond the Python world (say, Python<->Julia); the void* would be handed to
> you at the time you receive the vtable (however we handle that).
Yes, we should definitely not stick to objects here.
> I think this would fit neatly in Mark F.'s GSoC (Mark F.?), because you
> could embed the block-transposition that's needed for efficient "arr +
> arr.T" at this level.
>
> Imagine being able to do this in Cython:
>
> a[...] = b + c * d
>
> and have that essentially compile to the numexpr blocked approach, *but*
> where b, c, and d can have whatever type that exports CEP 1001? So c could
> be a "diagonal" array which uses O(n) storage to export O(n^2) elements, for
> instance, and the unrolled Cython code never needs to know.
I assume random accesses will happen through some kind of
B-tree/sparse index like mechanism?
> As far as NumPy goes, something along these lines should hopefully mean that
> new C code being written doesn't rely so much on what exactly goes into
> "ndarray" and what goes into other classes; so that we don't get the same
> problem again that we do now with code that doesn't use PEP 3118.
>
> Dag
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