Re: [boost] interest in structure of arrays container?

Subject: Re: [boost] interest in structure of arrays container?
From: Andreas Schäfer (gentryx_at_[hidden])
Date: 2016-10-16 07:07:56

Hey,

On 12:34 Sun 16 Oct     , Oswin Krause wrote:
> I gave a real use-case in a slightly more complicated setting. We had to 
> face the problem of "how can we align data in a way that we can unify a 
> set of slow matrix-vector multiplications into one fast matrix-matrix 
> multiplication". We usually have to traverse the same dataset several 
> 100-1000 times in order to do our computations, so some overhead in the 
> data setup phase (e.g. cost of insertion) is okay and we would sacrifice 
> even more performance in that phase if we got in return more performance 
> in the following three days of computations. Having said that, I agree 
> that just reordering does not give much in many cases. But the real gain 
> is given when data can be aligned better or used more independently. 
> e.g. if the struct contains a std::vector or std::string we can gain a 
> lot by using a data structure which stores the contents of the vectors 
> consecutively, thus removing one level of indirection.
> 
> Note that this pattern is also common in game industry, where objects 
> are made up of data structures which are used in (nearly) independent 
> parts of the game and where data has to be copied to and from the
> gpu.

Could you give a pseudo code description of what typical operations
you're running? In your fist mail you mentioned that you also have
some sparse matrices. I find this interesting because we've
implemented some improved containers for sparse matrices and SpMVM
(sparse matrix vector multiplication). Those are written for
our simulation codes and now I'm curious if they could be reused in
other settings.

Cheers
-Andreas

-- 
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Andreas Schäfer
HPC and Supercomputing
Institute for Multiscale Simulation
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
[phone]
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http://www.libgeodecomp.org
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