Ron Kneusel emailed our internal PWUISATAI (People Who Use IDL Sitting Around Talking About IDL) group yesterday with a clever function he saw in some CUDA C code to calculate the next power of two greater than or equal to a given integer. His IDL translation:

function next_power_2, x
   compile_opt idl2, logical_predicate

   n = x - 1 ; protects input
   n = ishft(n, -1) or n
   n = ishft(n, -2) or n
   n = ishft(n, -4) or n
   n = ishft(n, -8) or n
   n = ishft(n,-16) or n
   n = ishft(n,-32) or n
   n = ishft(n,-64) or n

   return, ++n
end

Both ISHFT and the OR operator are used here to perform bitwise operations on the input integer.

Here’s an example of using NEXT_POWER_2:

IDL> a = 3565946L
IDL> b = next_power_2(a)
IDL> print, b
     4194304
IDL> factor, b

            22
 4194304 = 2

I’ve used Ray Sterner’s FACTOR, a part of the IDL astrolib, to learn that 4194304 is 2²².

Atle Borsholm replied to the group with an alternate take:

function n2, x

   return, ishft(1ull,total(ishft(1ull,indgen(64)) lt x, /integer))
end

that gives the same result:

IDL> b = n2(a)
IDL> print, b
     4194304

Atle commented that although his version is shorter, Ron’s may be faster. I was curious, so I made a simple time test:

pro time_test_next_power_2
   compile_opt idl2

   n_iter = 1e6
   x = 275259L

   t0 = systime(/seconds)
   for i=1, n_iter do !null = next_power_2(x)
   t1 = systime(/seconds)
   print, 'NEXT_POWER_2:', t1-t0, format='(a15,f12.8,1x,"s")'

   t0 = systime(/seconds)
   for i=1, n_iter do !null = n2(x)
   t1 = systime(/seconds)
   print, 'N2:', t1-t0, format='(a15,f12.8,1x,"s")'
end

and ran it on my laptop:

IDL> time_test_next_power_2
  NEXT_POWER_2: 2.14159489 s
            N2: 2.77271295 s

So, Ron’s version is slightly faster. In either case, we hope you might find these functions handy!

Update: An even simpler version from a zero-padding routine I’d written long ago:

IDL> a = 3565946L
IDL> b = 2UL^ceil(alog(a)/alog(2))
IDL> print, b
     4194304

Note: I’ll be out on vacation for a bit, so I have some guest bloggers lined up for the next few weeks.