I’ve made a number of improvements to my Matrix benchmark over the past
two days, and I think it’s ready for public consumption. First of all, I
switched the repository from CVS to SVN, so to get it, you’ll need to do
svn checkout svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/cougar/MatrixBenchmark
Changes: aside from some cleanups in the build script, the major change
is that it now generates and inverts a (rational) Hilbert matrix. This
matrix is so ill-conditioned that you don’t even want to think about
inverting it with floating point arithmetic. I ran it with jRuby and
with Ruby 1.8.6 patch level 0, plus I profiled the Ruby interpreter on
Ruby 1.8.6. It’s spending a fair amount of time in the garbage collector
and in the integer divide routines now, which is a good thing. I may
attempt to run it with XRuby, Cardinal and Rubinius next weekend, but if
you happen to be a Ruby implementor and want to beat me to it, go right
ahead.
And just in case you happen to be or know a student who’s interested in
Ruby, the deadline for applying to Google Summer of Code is only four
days away! Head over to
and
http://www.rubycentral.org/projects/soc2007/ideas
for more details. And tell them Hilbert sent you. 
–
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/
If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given
rabbits fire.