short int or char in viRngUniform

[dario_suarez]

Hello,

I'm usign large array of very small random numbers, often between 0 and 10. This large arrays consume 4 bytes per entry (int), and I would like to know if there is a way for generating arrays of short int and chars to save memory.

Thanks in advance for your help,

Daro

[Sergey_M_Intel2 · Accepted solution]

Hello Dario,

Unfortunately there is no 8-bit or 16-bit variant of the uniform RNG in MKL. The only workaround that I see is to generate the data by portions as 32-bit integers and process those integers in a way you need. It will save the storage.

If for some reason youneed to store entire array of chars you still can generate it by blocks by converting each block into array of bytes, something like this:

#define N (1024*1000)

#define BLOCK_SIZE 1024

int block[BLOCK_SIZE];

char urng;

... //Create the random stream

for (i=0; i

{

// Generate block of 32-bit integers

viRndUniform(0, stream, BLOCK_SIZE, block, 0, 10);

for (j=0; j

{

urng[i+j] = (char)block;

}

}

... // Delete the random stream

That may help,

Regards,

Sergey

[dario_suarez]

Hi Sergey,

Thanks. The idea of blocking seems very good. I'll implement it and see the effect on memory and performance.

Best regards,

Daro