[boost] [GSoC] SIMD proposal

Subject: [boost] [GSoC] SIMD proposal
From: Mathieu - (ptr.jetable_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-03-23 16:45:41

Hello everyone,

I'm a french student preparing a Master in Computer Science. I'm
highly interested in participating in the 2011 GSoC with Boost. I'm
particulary keen on working on the boost.simd subject. I think having
SIMD abstraction in boost could be really beneficial (the first
example which comes to mind is boost.math).
However I have some questions about the subject in order to do my
proposal, some of them have already been discussed with Joel Falcou
and Mathias Gaunard on IRC, but here it is : One of the main concern I
have is that nt2 relies heavily on cmake to detect various things like
SSE instruction set support etc. From what I know (I ported nt2 to
OpenBSD a while ago), depending on the architecture different methods
are used, in order to be portable, like reading from sysctl in OSX or
lauching a little executable which collect various informations using
cpuid. So the question is : is bjam able to do everything we need to
do, or will we need to do the detection in any other way? I use, and I
kind of know bjam but I'm not an expert either, I believe Vladimir
Prus will be able to help here.
Another thing that is a bit blur for me at the moment, is what is the
scope of boost.simd? I mean, from what I see the simd part is quite
deep-rooted in nt2, has dependencies on several modules of it, so will
boost.simd be a subset of nt2 simd module or will we need to rewrite
part of it to avoid dragging huge dependencies (and well, end up doing
boost.nt2).

Mathieu Masson.

Regards.