556 – Contributed Poster Presentations: Section on Statistical Computing
Exploring the Main Sources of Inefficiency of Softwares for Matrix Operations
Luis Frank
University of Buenos Aires
Guillermo Frank
Universidad Tecnol´ogica Nacional
MINI 1.1 is a computer program designed to solve matrix operations by means of simple scripts. The program was first released in 2014 and improved since to reach the computing speed of leading softwares. Although MINI 1.0 (compiled on Xubuntu) outperformed the speed of other competing softwares, the authors noted that the computation by means of scripts instead of built-in functions turned out to be a serious limitation of MINI because it reduced the speed 5 to 10 times, but that such drawback could be partially compensated by parallel execution of the program, as preliminary results showed that parallel execution reduces the computing time almost to one tenth. The paper below presents a new version of MINI (version 1.1), this time compiled directly on Xubuntu and MS Windows, and executed through its own GUI, and compares its performance to that of other softwares when executed on parallel mode. The results show that scripts are still competitive compared to built-in functions.