Archive for the ‘Optimisation’ Category

How to…optimise Matlab

Friday, February 5th, 2010

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="image from wikipedia"][/caption] Matlab is a language that's used a lot in science and for good reason.  It's quick to code in, plus there are loads of built-in functions and packages available for many of the tasks that Programmer-Scientists might find themselves involved in.  ...

Doing several things at once: types of parallel computing

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

Image via Wikipedia For decades computers have got faster by increasing the power of a single processing unit but recently chip makers are hitting limits, mainly cost and heat. The results: instead of one processor getting faster, more are being added. At the same time the advent of ...

Links to some great articles on programming

Monday, January 19th, 2009

[caption id="attachment_410" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Photo by Manel"][/caption] The internet is full of smart people writing intelligently on how to write good software. Very few of these articles are from the perspective of a scientist (hence this blog!) but a lot of what they write is useful, interesting and, occasionally, entertaining. This ...

How to Optimise code

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Photo by NathanFromDeVryEET"][/caption] We've covered the theory of optimisation and how to write a profiler in previous articles.  This article is about specific optimisations that you can use to make your code go faster or use less resources. Related posts:How to…optimise MatlabWriting code for a big scientific collaborationScripting for science ...

Writing a simple profiler

Friday, September 12th, 2008

[caption id="attachment_197" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Photo by MNSC"][/caption] Before doing any kind of optimisation it is important to find out where your program is spending its time. A lot of people have wasted a lot of time and written lots of unnecessary code because they thought they knew where to optimise. If ...