I continue investigating matrix multiplication performance. Today I found 
that multiplication by array of zeros(..) is several times faster than 
multiplication by array of ones(..) or random numbers: 

julia> A = rand(200, 100)
...

julia> @time for i=1:1000 A * rand(100, 200) end 
 elapsed time: 3.009730414 seconds (480160000 bytes allocated, 11.21% gc 
time)

 julia> @time for i=1:1000 A * ones(100, 200) end 
 elapsed time: 2.973320655 seconds (480128000 bytes allocated, 12.72% gc 
time)

 julia> @time for i=1:1000 A * zeros(100, 200) end 
 elapsed time: 0.438900132 seconds (480128000 bytes allocated, 85.46% gc 
time)

So, A * zeros() is about 6 faster than other kinds of multiplication. Note 
also that it uses ~7x more GC time. 

On NumPy no such difference is seen:

In [106]: %timeit dot(A, rand(100, 200))
100 loops, best of 3: 2.77 ms per loop

In [107]: %timeit dot(A, ones((100, 200)))
100 loops, best of 3: 2.59 ms per loop

In [108]: %timeit dot(A, zeros((100, 200)))
100 loops, best of 3: 2.57 ms per loop


So I'm curious, how multiplying by zeros matrix is different from other 
multiplication types? 


Reply via email to