VMultiply

VMultiply is a term used in computational contexts to denote an operation that multiplies elements of vectors. In its most common usage, VMultiply refers to element-wise vector multiplication (also called the Hadamard product), where two vectors of equal length are multiplied component-wise to produce a new vector.

In some domains, the same label is used for related vector-multiplication operations, such as the vector-matrix product or the dot product, depending on the library or context. The exact interpretation should be verified from documentation in any given project.

Implementation typically emphasizes parallelism. On CPUs, VMultiply is often accelerated with SIMD instructions (such as SSE, AVX, or NEON). On GPUs, it is implemented via kernels that multiply corresponding elements across many threads. In many programming languages, the operation is exposed as a built-in operator or a library function, allowing concise, vectorized code.

Applications for VMultiply span several fields. It is used in image and signal processing for pixelwise or featurewise operations, in machine learning for scaling or masking features, and in scientific simulations where element-wise combination of vector data is required.

History and standards for VMultiply are informal; the term appears across various APIs, papers, and tutorials without a single universal specification. When encountering the term, it is advisable to consult the specific library’s documentation to determine whether it denotes element-wise multiplication or a related vector operation.

See also: Hadamard product; element-wise multiplication; vector-matrix multiplication; dot product; SIMD.