Benchmarking domain-specific compiler optimizations for variational forms

We examine the effect of using complexity-reducing relations [Kirby et al. 2006] to generate optimized code for the evaluation of finite-element variational forms. The optimizations are implemented in a prototype code named FErari, which has been integrated as an optimizing backend to the FEniCS form compiler, FFC [Kirby and Logg 2006; 2007]. In some cases, FErari provides very little speedup, while in other cases we obtain reduced local operation counts by a factor of as much as 7.9 and speedups for the assembly of the global sparse matrix by as much as a factor of 2.8 (see Figure 9). © 2008 ACM