Re: [ublas] New uBLAS maintainer

Subject: Re: [ublas] New uBLAS maintainer
From: rrossi_at_[hidden]
Date: 2010-03-15 09:59:30

        Hi David,

                  i just wanted to say that if you find it useful we have a
sparse_matrix * sparse_matrix version that should be quite efficient.
        unfortunately it is not really in ublas format, as the ublas does
not allow constructing a CSR matrix using the vectors of indices and
the vector of data. Let me know if you need it.
        We also have some CUDA solver, which may be of interest. Once again
it uses directly the three vectors of CSR, even if in our code we
internally use ublas ...
        let me know if some of this could be of help

        greetings

        Riccardo
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On Sun 14/03/10  9:44 PM , David Bellot  wrote:Dear uBLAS users,

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.
Let me quickly introduce myself: my name is David Bellot, I hold a
PhD in Computer Science and do research (currently in the finance
world) on Machine Learning and probabilistic artificial intelligence,
hence my strong interest in uBLAS.
First of all, I want to say a big Thank You to Gunter for all the
great work he did on uBLAS and a personal Thank You to help me getting
on-board and starting my new duty as uBLAS maintainer.

I would also like to talk about potential projects for the next
versions of uBLAS. For that purpose, I hope everybody will be
interested in bringing new ideas, wishes and even new pieces of code:
(1) as you can imagine, in machine learning, one often needs to
"randomly" access to sub-matrices. A good framework is already in
place for matrix_view, I would like to extend it so that to make it as
versatile as it is in other libraries or even Matlab.
(2) after reading last week emails, I think we could provide basic
implementations of a few standard algorithms like inversion, solvers,
etc...

(3) bindings are a hot topic. Let's be pragmatic: it's not supposed
to be part of uBLAS but having a standard interface would add a strong
value to uBLAS. And, I am like others, I want to play with my brand
new nVidia card.
(4) another hot topic which is a recurrent complain about uBLAS: the
product of 2 matrices. Do we want prod(A,B) or A*B. Let's think about
it because other libraries implemented A*B in a very efficient manner
too.
(5) Bindings for big libraries are also important and subject to
discussion. I think we have to work more on the interface between all
standard libraries when it is needed because, at the end of the day,
people also want to use uBLAS to make computations with existing
standard and not just write brand new algorithms.
(6) I will join Gunter in his effort to provide new documentation,
covering more topics, with tutorial and advanced topics. uBLAS is a
great library and a good documentation is of primary interest. That is
one of the most important topic for me (yes, way more than prod(A,B)
versus A*B)
Please everybody contribute with your own ideas and desiderata.
Let's work and make uBLAS simply the best.

With my Best Regards,
David Bellot

-- 
David Bellot, PhD
david.bellot_at_[hidden]
   http://david.bellot.free.fr