Re: [boost] [EXTERNAL] [compute] Review period starts today December 15, 2014, ends on December 24, 2014

Subject: Re: [boost] [EXTERNAL] [compute] Review period starts today December 15, 2014, ends on December 24, 2014
From: Belcourt, Kenneth (kbelco_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-12-30 19:15:18

On Dec 14, 2014, at 11:57 PM, Antony Polukhin <antoshkka_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> 1. What is your evaluation of the design?

Very nice, love the STL algorithm support, should make it fairly easy for our codes to migrate to Compute given our existing heavy reliance on STL.

> 2. What is your evaluation of the implementation?

Didn’t really look at it.

> 3. What is your evaluation of the documentation?

A pleasure to peruse, nicely laid out and well-phrased.

> 4. What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library?

Very high.  Easy to use with fairly comprehensive STL support.

> 5. Did you try to use the library?

Yes, ran many Compute examples and test programs, they worked as expected with a Tesla K20X on Cray.  Also added some Compute calls in one of our applications, they worked as expected.

> With what compiler?

Cray compiler.

> Did you have any problems?

I ran into a compilation problem on another Cray system:

"boost/include/boost/compute/type_traits/type_name.hpp", line 79: error: 
          class
          "boost::compute::detail::type_name_trait<boost::compute::char_>" has
          already been defined
  BOOST_COMPUTE_DEFINE_BUILTIN_TYPE_NAME_FUNCTION(char)
  ^

Commenting out line 79 got me past the error.

> 6. How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A quick reading? In-depth study?

A few hours, mostly bulding and testing out the Compute tests and it’s interaction with our own codes.  Studied STL support to assess usability, ease of finding what I need in the documentation.  I didn’t closely examine the implementation details though I expect to as we begin to use it.

> 7. Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain?

Yes, I’m knowledgeable.

> 8. Do you think the library should be accepted as a Boost library?

Yes.  It’s already highly usable in it’s current form and I’m confident it will evolve and be improved once accepted into Boost.  Very nice work Kyle.

— Noel Belcourt