Ctypes & PAPI
This repository contains an implementation of molecular dynamics simulation by connecting python, and c, using c types. Ability to connect python to a faster programming language such as C is crucial in today's world. Where most of the machine learning problems are being solved in python, it is essential to write C modules and call it, just the way numpy works!
Ctypes
Ctypes is a library for Python which provides C compatible data types, and allows calling functions in shared libraries. To create shared library, geekstuff gives a good introduction. The c module exposed as a shared object can be called from python and he best part is, we can pass arguments by reference. This feature makes the computation at ease. In the example code repository, a simulation example can be found. One examining closely, you can see that simulation is run in python and the updations are made in C.
PAPI
PAPI modules are used to take the performance measure from the Hardware Performance Counters.
Use #include <papi.h> to include/import papi module
With PAPI, we can read various informations such as the Cache misses, hits, Store misses and many more. A detailed list of suppoerted counters for various architecture can be found here. PAPI error handling mechanism throws error if particular attribute is not supported by system. A detailed description of errors can be seen here