Re: Speed of Ocave vs Matlab?

[Alexander Barth]

On Mon, Sep 7, 2015 at 11:14 PM, Michael Barnes <address@hidden> wrote:

I just got asked this question at a computer vision conference. Does anyone have any benchmark examples I can quote?

It strongly depends on the type of benchmark. In my tests, octave turned out the be faster than Matlab:

http://www.geosci-model-dev.net/7/225/2014/gmd-7-225-2014.pdf

(table 4 on page 9, open access journal under creative commons).

The code needs to solve a sparse system defined by a partial differential equation. Large-parts of the code are vectorized and the only loops are essentially the number of dimensions (which is typically 2 or 3).

I was actually surprised by this results and I did not perform any optimization specific to octave. I only vectorized the code which is beneficial for octave and Matlab.

In the above mentioned paper, you will however also find some references where Matlab was faster than Octave.

The conclusion for me is: if performance is important, you need to vectorize the code as much as possible. This is not only necessary for octave but also for Matlab. If this is not possible, then I use a compiled language like Fortran.

I hope this helps,

Alex