Hi all and Pedro, In 2012/12/30 I recieved an e-mail from Pedro (sorry if you want to keep this activity secret) that he want to use uBLAS http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_48_0/libs/numeric/ublas/doc/index.htm for matrix-matrxi, matrix-vector manipulations. For the first step, it is a very very good idea.
Here, I'm wondering whether we can include FORTRAN in a build requirement. uBLAS and BLAS [http://www.netlib.org/blas/] are independent implementation but BLAS is the original and well tested. and LAPACK [http://www.netlib.org/lapack/] which is based on BLAS, and can do much more things like least square fitting, singular value decomposition, solving linear equations and solving eigenvalue problems (and whatever you think will be found in LAPACK). Moreover web hit of LAPACK page is 111,192,369! [http://www.netlib.org/master_counts2.html#lapack] We can also use OpenBLAS to speed up BLAS part and some parts of LAPACK. BLAS is usually slow in their reference implementation (10-100 times slower for dgemm in particular), and optimized BLAS like ATLAS, Intel MKL, GotoBLAS2, OpenBLAS are much faster. OpenBLAS is a derivative of GotoBLAS2. Unfortunately GotoBLAS2 is discontinued, but OpenBLAS is actively maintained and ported to many processors. Unfortunately or forutnately, BLAS and LAPACK are written in FORTRAN, (and LAPACK > 3.1 requires FORTRAN90). All are distributed under BSD style license except for Intel MKL, so we can include without violation of Apache license. Note that I'm a maintiner of BLAS, LAPACK in FreeBSD, http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/math/lapack/Makefile and I'm a (only) principal developer of multiple precision version of BLAS and LAPACK called MPACK. http://mplapack.sourceforge.net/ So - depending on BLAS, LAPACK and OpenBLAS in the future are very good idea, and provides far better functionality and performance without license issues. One problem is that we will require build dependency as FORTRAN! What do you think? Best, -- Nakata Maho http://nakatamaho.riken.jp/ http://blog.goo.ne.jp/nakatamaho/ http://nakatamaho.riken.jp/maho.pgp.txt http://ja.openoffice.org/
