ni...@lysator.liu.se (Niels Möller) writes: I don't fully understand current perfpow.c. But some comments nevertheless, for possible improvements: I used to understand it well, when I supervised Martin a few years back.
1. We seem to get from inverted root to plain root by binverting the input. For the binv_sqrt case, it's seems clearly cheaper to do it with a mullo. For binv_root, it's not as obvious since we need a different iteration to converge to x^{1/n - 1} rather than to x^{-1/n}, but I think both iterations should be about the same cost, so that mullo + other iteration is cheaper than binvert + current iteration. OK. One might also want to consider which is the most useful function. Now, the inversion in perfpow appear to be amortized over several is_kth_power calls. I'm not sure what that means for performance. Since these calls will work with roots of different sizes, a single large binvert may still be slower than a number of mullo's of various smaller sizes. I didn't get that. 2. The iterations take no advantage of cancellation. E.g., in the binv_sqrt, we should do the iteration as x' <- x - x * (a x^2 - 1)/2 Here, low part of a x^2 - 1 is always zero, and when we next multiply it by x, we don't need to multiply by those zero limbs. I guess we could also make some use of mpn_rsh1_sub. And mulmid? (mpn_rsh1sub_n is used for the current iteration at line 187.) 3. In pow_equals, we compute and compare the least significant limbs of the product first. But the low xn limbs will *always* match since they're computed as a mod B^{xn} root, right? I think a better test would be to compute the *most* significant single limb of the power. I think that's doable with only double-limb arithmetic (umul_ppmm) a relative error on the order of k/B or so. Such a check should give a pretty small probability of false positives, so if the high limb is close enough, it may be simplest and good enough to always compute all the limbs for a final check. Sounds right. Such convolution type sum-of-products might want a separate function, returning 3 limbs. 4. Use wraparound where possible in the newton iterations. Yep. Or mulmid. 5. In binv_root, I think the number of bits of precision is *exactly* doubled in each iteration. At least I'm fairly confident that it does for the interation in my code, and I think that's how Hensel lifting usually works. The reason why sqrt does not exactly double the number of bits is that we divide by the exponent (2), which in this case is a factor of the modulo, which makes it a somewhat strange Hensel lift. Your observation is consistent with how the 'order' vectors are initialised. Perhaps you could add some of your remarks as a comment to the file? -- Torbjörn _______________________________________________ gmp-devel mailing list gmp-devel@gmplib.org http://gmplib.org/mailman/listinfo/gmp-devel