MATLAB: How to reduce number of loops

Question

Hello,

I have code, which assembles coefficients into large sparse matrix. My coding seems to be inefficient as I use 3 loops, so I'm trying to improve the code to get better pefromance. I think it would be nice to reduce the number of loops to single loop and run it parallel (parfor), but I'm struggling to do that..

The main matrix sig is a matrix of size LX,LY,LZ and vectors dx, dy, dz holds the distances between nods along the diretion X, Y an Z.

 for i = 2:LX-1
    for j = 2:LY-1
        for k = 2:LZ-1
      Ctop(i,j,k) = (-1/dz(k-1))*((sig(i-1,j  ,k-1)*((dx(i-1)*dy(j  ))/4))+...
                                  (sig(i  ,j  ,k-1)*((dx(i  )*dy(j  ))/4))+...
                                  (sig(i-1,j-1,k-1)*((dx(i-1)*dy(j-1))/4))+...
                                  (sig(i  ,j-1,k-1)*((dx(i  )*dy(j-1))/4)));
       end
    end
 end
C1v=reshape(Ctop,[],1);

thanks for help!

Answer 1

Ok, well, you could adapt the following to your case then. I am not checking in-depth that it is working though, and there is room for improvement as I didn't optimize indexing for managing properly boundaries..

 n    = 100 ;
 sig  = 20 * rand(n,n,n) ; 
 LX   = size(sig,1) ;
 LY   = size(sig,2) ;
 LZ   = size(sig,3) ;
 dx   = 0.1 + rand(LX, 1) ; % Made irregular for testing..
 dy   = 0.8 + zeros(LY, 1) ;
 dz   = 0.3 + zeros(LZ, 1) ;
 Ctop = zeros(size(sig)) ;
 % - Your code.
 tic ;
 for i = 2:LX-1
    for j = 2:LY-1
        for k = 2:LZ-1
      Ctop(i,j,k) = (-1/dz(k-1))*((sig(i-1,j  ,k-1)*((dx(i-1)*dy(j  ))/4))+...
                                  (sig(i  ,j  ,k-1)*((dx(i  )*dy(j  ))/4))+...
                                  (sig(i-1,j-1,k-1)*((dx(i-1)*dy(j-1))/4))+...
                                  (sig(i  ,j-1,k-1)*((dx(i  )*dy(j-1))/4)));
       end
    end
 end
 toc
 % - Meshgrid based code.
 Ctop_mesh = zeros(size(Ctop)) ;
 tic ;
 [dy_m0, dx_m0] = meshgrid(dy(2:end-1), dx(2:end-1)) ;
 [dy_m1, dx_m1] = meshgrid(dy(1:end-2), dx(1:end-2)) ;
 sig_m00 = sig(2:end-1,2:end-1,:) ;
 sig_m10 = sig(1:end-2,2:end-1,:) ;
 sig_m01 = sig(2:end-1,1:end-2,:) ;
 sig_m11 = sig(1:end-2,1:end-2,:) ;
 for k = 2 : LZ-1
      Ctop_mesh(2:end-1,2:end-1,k) = (-1/dz(k-1)) / 4 * ...
          (sig_m10(:,:,k-1) .* dx_m1 .* dy_m0 + ...
           sig_m00(:,:,k-1) .* dx_m0 .* dy_m0 +...
           sig_m11(:,:,k-1) .* dx_m1 .* dy_m1 +...
           sig_m01(:,:,k-1) .* dx_m0 .* dy_m1) ;
 end
 toc
 % - Check.
 tmp = abs(Ctop_mesh(2:end-1,2:end-1,2:end-1)-Ctop(2:end-1,2:end-1,2:end-1)) ;
 all(tmp(:) < 1e-12)

This code outputs:

 Elapsed time is 6.281855 seconds.          % 3 nested loops
 Elapsed time is 0.408983 seconds.          % meshgrid
 ans =                                      % check
     1

Note that it is possible to get rid of the last FOR loop and work with a 3D array for dz built this way:

 dz_m1 = permute(repmat(dz(1:end-1),[1,LX-1,LY-1]), [2,3,1]) ;

but I am not sure that it is more efficient (especially if you want to PARFOR the remaining loop).