Re: [ublas] How to solve systems of linear equations?

Subject: Re: [ublas] How to solve systems of linear equations?
From: Rutger ter Borg (rutger_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-03-11 17:05:55

Jesse Perla wrote:

> I was under the impression that most of the newer libraries took advantage
> of vectorization for small, fixed size matrices through some mechanism,
> but
> I usually don't know what I am talking about.  ublas is a great,
> stable,library and deserves a defense, even if its eventual deprecation is
> considered.

Indeed, that could be achieved through compile-time loop unrolling / mapping 
that to specific compiler instructions. However, compilers have come a long 
way, nowadays, it's nothing short but amazing what they're capable of, 
including detection and unrolling of loops.

> 
> When will you have magma bindings for us :-)
>

By that time, it will be a matter of recompiling your lapack-bindings code 
with something like BOOST_NUMERIC_BINDINGS_LAPACK_MAGMA (and/or containers 
residing in GPU memory will trigger this automatically).

> I share the bias for linear algebra, but you still need to have a good
> matrix library for basic operations (multiplication, slices, etc.) that is
> highly expressive... so the container does matter a lot.

You're right. That, and containers that support parallel/distributed memory 
(to enable blacs/pblas/scalapack support), and gpu-memory stuff.

Cheers,

Rutger