Re: [boost] different matrix library?

Subject: Re: [boost] different matrix library?
From: DE (satan66613_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-08-11 12:09:50

on 11.08.2009 at 18:16
 Edward Grace wrote :
>> will you as a user concern about how tricky an implementation is?
>> or will you rather care about how convinient and clear public  
>> interface
>> is?
> The latter - naturally! If you can make it extensible so that the
> back end could (for example) be thread, CUDA, and MPI aware so much  
> the better. ;-)
well at this moment i can not imagine such a mechanism to transform
particular (no matter how complex, e.g. (a + b*c - d*e*f...)) code to
lib calls
i will think about a possibility of such

>> i hope to make an implementation 'as good as' but which will exploit
>> all of c++ advantages
> I look forward to it!  Competing with top-end platform tuned
> FORTRAN90 compilers is not a challenge for the feint hearted!
i'l do my best!
but i will need someone help to express some equations in fortran to
compare the performance

> Well.  You're a braver man than I!  Building a templated linear
> algebra library is a lot of work!
indeed! (but it is very interesting too)
and once it is built won't i just throw it away?

> How so?  I don't use Blitz++ as it appears to have stagnated - very
> unfortunate. The concept seems quite attractive however.  For example
> Blitz++ style expressiveness need not constrain you to scalars  
> (tensors of order zero), vectors (tensors of order one) or matricies  
> (tensors of order 2) and can allow far more flexibility than simple  
> matrix calculus.
> For example, viewing _1 as placeholders in the a similar manner to
> boost::bind, being able to write things (I'm ignoring contra- vs. co- 
> variance) like:
> [here goes code]
> so that the Einstein summation convention was observed (summation  
> over repeated indices),
> would be superdoubleplusgood.
you made my mind boil!
i don't use such notation so i did not even think to implement such a
feature
but if you claim this feature is essential... well it must be
implemented indeed
and don't like that... placeholders

> Incidentally you may be interested in the Tensor Contraction Engine,
>    http://www.csc.lsu.edu/~gb/TCE/
> or the tensor template library
>    http://ttl.yanenko.com/
i ran through that
TCE is targeted to chemists and fortran programmers so it's not
rather interesting
and the latter supplies only static sized tensors (if i understood
right) which is not flexible in general

-- 
Pavel