faster implementation of sum ( for Codility test )

Question

How can the following simple implementation of sum be faster?

private long sum( int [] a, int begin, int end ) {
    if( a == null   ) {
        ret         


        

Answer 1

This won't help you with an O(n^2) algorithm, but you can optimize your sum.

At a previous company, we had Intel come by and give us optimization tips. They had one non-obvious and somewhat cool trick. Replace:

long r = 0; 
for( int i =  begin ; i < end ; i++ ) { 
   r+= a[i]; 
} 

with

long r1 = 0, r2 = 0, r3 = 0, r4 = 0; 
for( int i =  begin ; i < end ; i+=4 ) { 
   r1+= a[i];
   r2+= a[i + 1];
   r3+= a[i + 2];
   r4+= a[i + 3];
}
long r = r1 + r2 + r3 + r4;
// Note: need to be clever if array isn't divisible by 4

Why this is faster: In the original implementation, your variable r is a bottleneck. Every time through the loop, you have to pull data from memory array a (which takes a couple cycles), but you can't do multiple pulls in parallel, because the value of r in the next iteration of the loop depends on the value of r in this iteration of the loop. In the second version, r1, r2, r3, and r4 are independent, so the processor can hyperthread their execution. Only at the very end do they come together.