Tag Archives: m4rie

Matrix Multiplication over GF(p^e)

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After my talk at Sage Days 35 in Warwick (that was in winter 2011) David Harvey had an idea on how to speed up matrix multiplication over \mathbb{F}_{p^n}. We spend some time on this in Warwick and developed this idea further (adding fun stuff like Mixed Integer Programming in the process) but did not get around to do much on this project in the mean time (I have explained the idea at the end of my talk in Mykonos, though).

Just now, in a conversation with Richard Parker I was reminded of this dormant project, i.e., the question of how many multiplications i \mathbb{F}_p it takes to do a multiplication in \mathbb{F}_{p^n}. In particular, I recalled to have written some code for Sage which gives some upper bound to this answer which is better than Karatsuba.

Well, here’s an interactive demo … gosh, I love the Sage cell server.

M4RIE: support for finite fields up to degree 16 added

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I committed support for finite fields up to degree 16 to M4RIE a few days ago. Furthermore, the dependency on Givaro for constructing finite fields was dropped.

Don’t get me wrong. Givaro is a fine library, much better than what I wrote for M4RIE. However, it is a C++ library while M4RIE is a C library and the little functionality of finite field arithmetic needed in M4RIE was not that hard to add natively. In the past M4RIE relied on Givaro for running tests and benchmarks, the core library was always free of C++. However, as we plan to add support for high-degree polynomials over matrices over\mathbb{F}_2, we need the ability to create finite extensions of \mathbb{F}_2 on the fly in the core library.

Continue reading →

Report: Workshop on Efficient Linear Algebra for Gröbner Basis Computations

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As you may know, today is the last day of the wokshop on Efficient Linear Algebra for Gröbner Basis Computations that Christian Eder, Burcin Eröcal, Alexander Dreyer and I organised.

I have to say that I am quite pleased with how the workshop played out. We planned the whole thing to be hands on: people were strongly encouraged to work on projects, i.e., to write code preferably together, in addition to attending talks. Those who attended a Sage Days workshop in the past, will know what workshop format I am referring to. Continue reading →

Rank-profile revealing Gaussian elimination and the CUP matrix decomposition

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by Claude-Pierre Jeannerod, Clément Pernet, Arne Storjohann is now available on the archive. I like this paper a lot and we also referenced it in both the M4RI elimination paper and the M4RIE paper so three cheers that it’s now available.

Abstract: Transforming a matrix over a field to echelon form, or decomposing the matrix as a product of structured matrices that reveal the rank profile, is a fundamental building block of computational exact linear algebra. This paper surveys the well known variations of such decompositions and transformations that have been proposed in the literature. We present an algorithm to compute the CUP decomposition of a matrix, adapted from the LSP algorithm of Ibarra, Moran and Hui (1982), and show reductions from the other most common Gaussian elimination based matrix transformations and decompositions to the CUP decomposition. We discuss the advantages of the CUP algorithm over other existing algorithms by studying time and space complexities: the asymptotic time complexity is rank sensitive, and comparing the constants of the leading terms, the algorithms for computing matrix invariants based on the CUP decomposition are always at least as good except in one case. We also show that the CUP algorithm, as well as the computation of other invariants such as transformation to reduced column echelon form using the CUP algorithm, all work in place, allowing for example to compute the inverse of a matrix on the same storage as the input matrix.


http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.5717

Sage/FLINT Days aka Sage Days 35

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I am writing this while waiting for my taxi to leave Sage Days 35. Although, I didn’t get much actual coding done, it was great fun and very useful. I met a lot of old friend, new faces and managed to put faces to e-mail addresses.

In terms of coding projects, first, I tried to speed up linear algebra mod p where p is a 32 or 64 bit prime. But it turns out that any trick I could think of could not improve on Frederik’s code. So that didn’t lead anywhere but I allowed me to read some code of FLINT2 (very readable) and admire how carefully it is written.

My other two projects both involved evaluate–pointwise-multiply–interpolate algorithms for fast matrix-matrix products over finite extension fields or for matrices with polynomial coefficients (over prime fields).  After my talk on M4RI(E) David Harvey worked out how to improve multiplication over \mathbb{F}_{2^6} from 17 multiplications over \mathbb{F}_2 to 15, which then lead to a general approach for \mathbb{F}_{2^m} with composite m. Much of it remains to be implemented (efficiently), but the \mathbb{F}_{2^6} example indeed shows a 10% speed-up as expected. The code is not clean yet, uses way too much memory and doesn’t deal with the more advanced finite field stuff appropriately. It should end up in M4RIE eventually though.

I also contributed a bit to #12177 which is about a “prime slice” implementation of matrices over \mathbb{F}_{p^k}. The idea is essentially to represent  these matrices as polynomials with matrix coefficients and to use fast polynomial multiplication algorithms for these polynomials. It turns out, this works very well even for small finite fields. Burcin Eröcal did all the coding, I only helped with some discussions. We need to polish the code a lot to be usable, so if you like matrices over \mathbb{F}_{p^k} head over to #12177 and help out.

The M4RIE library for dense linear algebra over small fields with even characteristic

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I finally uploaded a pre-print of the M4RIE paper to the arXiv:

Abstract: In this work, we present the M4RIE library which implements efficient algorithms for linear algebra with dense matrices over \mathbb{F}_{2^e} for 2 \leq e \leq 10. As the name of the library indicates, it makes heavy use of the M4RI library both directly (i.e., by calling it) and indirectly (i.e., by using its concepts). We provide an open-source GPLv2+ C library for efficient linear algebra over \mathbb{F}_{2^e} for e small. In this library we implemented an idea due to Bradshaw and Boothby which reduces matrix multiplication over \mathbb{F}_{p^k} to a series of matrix multiplications over \mathbb{F}_p. Furthermore, we propose a caching technique – Newton-John tables – to avoid finite field multiplications which is inspired by Kronrod’s method (“M4RM”) for matrix multiplication over \mathbb{F}_2. Using these two techniques we provide asymptotically fast triangular solving with matrices (TRSM) and PLE-based Gaussian elimination. As a result, we are able to significantly improve upon the state of the art in dense linear algebra over \mathbb{F}_{2^e} with 2 \leq e \leq 10.