Beating C in Scientific Computing Applications

Authors

Didier Verna

Where

Third European Lisp Workshop at ECOOP

Place

Nantes, France

Type

inproceedings

Projects

Climb

Keywords

Software engineering

Date

2006-07-11

Abstract

This paper presents an ongoing research on the behavior and performance of Lisp with respect to C in the context of scientific numerical computing. Several simple image processing algorithms are used to evaluate the performance of pixel access and arithmetic operations in both languages. We demonstrate that the behavior of equivalent Lisp and C code is similar with respect to the choice of data structures and types, and also to external parameters such as hardware optimization. We further demonstrate that properly typed and optimized Lisp code runs as fast as the equivalent C code, or even faster in some cases.

Documents

• Paper

Bibtex (lrde.bib)

@InProceedings{	  verna.06.ecoop,
  author	= {Didier Verna},
  title		= {Beating {C} in Scientific Computing Applications},
  booktitle	= {Third European Lisp Workshop at ECOOP},
  year		= 2006,
  address	= {Nantes, France},
  month		= jul,
  note		= {Best paper award.},
  abstract	= {This paper presents an ongoing research on the behavior
		  and performance of Lisp with respect to C in the context of
		  scientific numerical computing. Several simple image
		  processing algorithms are used to evaluate the performance
		  of pixel access and arithmetic operations in both
		  languages. We demonstrate that the behavior of equivalent
		  Lisp and C code is similar with respect to the choice of
		  data structures and types, and also to external parameters
		  such as hardware optimization. We further demonstrate that
		  properly typed and optimized Lisp code runs as fast as the
		  equivalent C code, or even faster in some cases.}
}