Showing posts with label numpy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label numpy. Show all posts

2012-03-28

High Performance Python

At PyCon 2012, Ian Oszvald showed how to write high performance Python. Key is understanding performance using profiling. In his introductory remarks, he tells how he came to work in Python after years of doing industry AI research using C++. It's the same reason I started using Python extensively, and I've known several other people who adopted Python generally for the same reason:
I was more productive at the end of the first day using Python to parse SAX than I was after 5 years as being senior dev using C++
Anyway, he has a blog post about his talk, with the slides and links to further material. The source is at github: get it by doing
git clone git://github.com/ianozsvald/HighPerformancePython_PyCon2012.git
The first sort of case review he gives is converting old Fortran Xray diffraction code to Python/Cython, and then optimizing the Python in the first day getting an order of magnitude speedup. Further optimization was done using other tools, getting to a final speedup of 300 on the pure Python numpy code.

As with all performance tuning, the key is profiling the code to understand exactly where the code spends its time.