Quickly Evaluating MANY matlabFunctions - matlab

Question

This post builds on my post about quickly evaluating analytic Jacobian in Matlab:
fast evaluation of analytical jacobian in MATLAB
The key difference is that now, I am working with the Hessian and I have to evaluate close to 700 matlabFunctions (instead of 1 matlabFunction, like I did for the Jacobian) each time the hessian is evaluated. So there is an opportunity to do things a little differently.
I have tried to do this two ways so far and I am thinking about implementing a third and was wondering if anyone has any other suggestions. I will go through each method with a toy example, but first some preprocessing to generate these matlabFunctions:
PreProcessing:
% This part of the code is calculated once, it is not the issue
dvs = 5;
X=sym('X',[dvs,1]);
num = dvs - 1; % number of constraints
% multiple functions
for k = 1:num
f1(X(k+1),X(k)) = (X(k+1)^3 - X(k)^2*k^2);
c(k) = f1;
end
gradc = jacobian(c,X).'; % .' performs transpose
parfor k = 1:num
hessc{k} = jacobian(gradc(:,k),X);
end
parfor k = 1:num
hess_name = strcat('hessian_',num2str(k));
matlabFunction(hessc{k},'file',hess_name,'vars',X);
end
METHOD #1 : Evaluate functions in series
%% Now we use the functions to run an "optimization." Just for an example the "optimization" is just a for loop
fprintf('This is test A, where the functions are evaluated in series!\n');
tic
for q = 1:10
x_dv = rand(dvs,1); % these are the design variables
lambda = rand(num,1); % these are the lagrange multipliers
x_dv_cell = num2cell(x_dv); % for passing large design variables
for k = 1:num
hess_name = strcat('hessian_',num2str(k));
function_handle = str2func(hess_name);
H_temp(:,:,k) = lambda(k)*function_handle(x_dv_cell{:});
end
H = sum(H_temp,3);
end
fprintf('The time for test A was:\n')
toc
METHOD # 2: Evaluate functions in parallel
%% Try to run a parfor loop
fprintf('This is test B, where the functions are evaluated in parallel!\n');
tic
for q = 1:10
x_dv = rand(dvs,1); % these are the design variables
lambda = rand(num,1); % these are the lagrange multipliers
x_dv_cell = num2cell(x_dv); % for passing large design variables
parfor k = 1:num
hess_name = strcat('hessian_',num2str(k));
function_handle = str2func(hess_name);
H_temp(:,:,k) = lambda(k)*function_handle(x_dv_cell{:});
end
H = sum(H_temp,3);
end
fprintf('The time for test B was:\n')
toc
RESULTS:
METHOD #1 = 0.008691 seconds
METHOD #2 = 0.464786 seconds
DISCUSSION of RESULTS
This result makes sense because, the functions evaluate very quickly and running them in parallel waists a lot of time setting up and sending out the jobs to the different Matlabs ( and then getting the data back from them). I see the same result on my actual problem.
METHOD # 3: Evaluating the functions using the GPU
I have not tried this yet, but I am interested to see what the performance difference is. I am not yet familiar with doing this in Matlab and will add it once I am done.
Any other thoughts? Comments? Thanks!