Re: [ublas] New uBLAS maintainer

Subject: Re: [ublas] New uBLAS maintainer
From: Paul Leopardi (paul.leopardi_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-03-21 00:49:57

On Monday 15 March 2010 07:44:51 David Bellot wrote:
> recently Gunter Winkler asked for someone to take over the maintenance of
> the uBLAS library. As a fervent user of uBLAS and a strong believer in Open
> Source and Free Software, I decided to propose myself as the new duty man.
> I will therefore have the honor to be in charge of uBLAS and will do my
> best to make uBLAS reach its goals of versatility, performance and ease of
> use.

Hi David,
Congratulations on your new role.

My wishlist is similar but a bit different to the others.

1. Computational complexity of addition for compressed and coordinate 
matrices: Has it been fixed yet?
http://lists.boost.org/MailArchives/ublas/2007/01/1695.php
More generally, computational complexity of algorithms for each type of 
storage.

2. Block matrices, matrices of matrices and (slightly more generally) matrices 
over non-commutative associative algebras. Has this discussion progressed?
http://lists.boost.org/MailArchives/ublas/2006/02/0970.php

Perhaps these could be implemented using algebra traits or concepts?
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.132.7073&rep=rep1&type=pdf
http://oonumerics.org/tmpw01/willcock.pdf
ftp://ftp.cs.indiana.edu/pub/techreports/TR638.pdf

3. "Borrowing" ideas from other projects, and/or providing interfaces to other 
projects. Most notably Eigen and MTL4. 

Eigen provides higher-level routines which cannot be found in uBLAS 
(understandable, because the B in uBLAS stands for Basic). 
http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/dox/TutorialGeometry.html

More high-level routines are in progress or planned:
http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Status_of_unsupported_modules
http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Todo_for_3.0

Eigen also provides routines which compare in speed to those of BLAS and 
LAPACK.
http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Benchmark
http://lwn.net/Articles/319838/

MTL4 makes heavy use of expression templates
http://osl.iu.edu/research/mtl/mtl4/doc/intro.php3

Best, Paul