On Friday, 20 January 2012, Jim Fairman wrote:
> New Fourier transform algorithm supposedly improves the speed of Fourier
> transforms get up to "a tenfold increase in speed" depending upon
> circumstances. Hopefully this will get incorporated into our refinement
> programs.
>
> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/faster-fourier-transforms-0118.html
This report is interesting, but it is not immediately obvious to me that
crystallographic transforms are in the class of problems for which
this algorithm is applicable.
From reading the very non-technical article linked above, I conclude that
a better summary would be "New approach to Fourier approximation provides
a very cheap (fast) way of identifying and then discarding components that
contribute very little to the signal". In other words, it seems to be a
way of increasing the compression ratio for lossy image/audio compression
without increasing the amount of time required for compression.
So if you're doing map fitting while listening to streamed mp3 music
files, perhaps your map inversion will get a slightly larger slice of
the CPU time relative to LastFM.
On the other hand, it is possible that somewhere in here lies a clever
approach to faster solvent flattening.
Ethan
