Fourth Weekly Check-in

peterbell10
Published: 06/24/2019

What did you do this week?

My main scipy.fft PR is now very close to being merged and so I've been responding to some final review comments and making minor tweaks. Otherwise, I'm keeping the changes minimal to give it a chance to be reviewed fully.

I've also been collaborating with the author of the pypocketfft library: many of the changes I made for my PR have now been merged into the upstream repo. I've also been having discussions with him about improving the API such as adding real-to-complex inverse FFTs and a cache for FFT plans to improve performace of repeated transforms. These have already been prototyped and show promising results.

On the backend front, I've been actively contributing to uarray. I've been working with the maintainer to solidify the protocol, as well as contributing a new feature to remove default-valued positional arguments. It's currently looking like the performance overhead of uarray is the biggest hurdle so I've been benchmarking the overhead involved and discussing how to mitigate that.

What is coming up next?

I plan to rewrite the core of the uarray using the python C API to try and bring down the overhead to a more acceptable level. This would be my first time using the C API, so progress may be slow at first but since this is key to the backend system's performance, it should be well worth the effort.

Once my first PR is merged, I can also open a new PR which updates to the latest version of pypocketfft which has a reworked API and also includes many of the features I added for use in SciPy. Updating now should also make it easier to maintain in future since it will reduce the size of the patch added over the library.

Did you get stuck anywhere?

I haven't had any real blockers this week and I think good progress has been made.