[mlpack] Wishing to be part of mlpack under GSoC 13

[Ryan Curtin]

On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 01:19:57AM +0530, Piyush Kumar wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm Piyush Kumar, a student doing third year of my bachelors degree from
> IIT Bombay (India). This mail is regarding my interest in contributing to
> mlpack's existing code.
> Two of the ideas seemed interesting to me, one is the optimization of tree
> traversers, and second one is compile time optimization via profiling.
> 
> 1) "optimization of tree traversers" : I have considerable knowledge of C++
> and graph algorithms, and have recently done course on AI and ML, hence
> have basics idea of the concepts used in your current implementations.

Hello Piyush,

The tree traversers project has had some interest already.  Here are a
few links to mailing list posts which may be helpful:

https://mailman.cc.gatech.edu/pipermail/mlpack/2013-April/000010.html
https://mailman.cc.gatech.edu/pipermail/mlpack/2013-April/000021.html
https://mailman.cc.gatech.edu/pipermail/mlpack/2013-April/000030.html
https://mailman.cc.gatech.edu/pipermail/mlpack/2013-April/000059.html

If there are questions you have which aren't answered there, feel free
to ask.

> 2) "profiling for further optimization" : I have negligible past experience
> with profilers, but am enthusiastic about optimization analysis. Can you
> provide some information regarding your current profiling methods so that I
> can run some tests?

I wrote a little bit about PGO here:

https://mailman.cc.gatech.edu/pipermail/mlpack/2013-April/000052.html

I think a link in there will be helpful in describing what
profile-guided optimization is.  Basically, the PGO process is
automatically done by the compiler, but we would have to set up rules to
get GCC to do the profiling, and we would have to choose the datasets to
run on well.

Let me know if there are other questions I can answer.

Thanks,

Ryan

-- 
Ryan Curtin       | "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here!  This is the
ryan at igglybob.com | War Room!" - President Muffley