[gsoc] Inquiry about Computing/Eigen GSoC project

[Gael Guennebaud]

Hello everybody,

I'm a core developer of Eigen and I'm obviously quite excited that you are 
looking at our library. I don't know anything about scilab internals, but I 
still would like to emphasize some key unique features of Eigen which could be 
very interesting for a project like scilab.

The main one is probably the fact that Eigen is 100% template code and that 
(almost) everything that BLAS/LAPACK propose has been (re)implemented in an 
efficient manner.  As a consequence you can very easily write clean generic 
and efficient code working for all kind of scalar types. Supporting a new 
scalar type in Eigen is a matter of a very few lines of code.

For instance, if scilab was based on Eigen, fully supporting MPFR / GMP would 
be straightforward (at least for the low level aspects).

Other advantages include the nice C++ API and the license (LGPL).

Now regarding the pure performance aspect, I have to acknowledge that we'll 
probably never completely beat GotoBlas or MKL, but we are very very close to 
them. If being able to still use such non free libraries is a concern, this is 
something that can be very easily integrated inside Eigen itself. Indeed, 
Eigen's internal optimized routines for matrix products mimic the respective 
BLAS one.

I don't want to annoy you more, so I'm stopping here. 

Of course if someone picks this GSOC project I'll be happy to help on the 
Eigen side.

Cheers,
Gael

-- 
Gaël Guennebaud
Iparla - INRIA Bordeaux


On Saturday 20 March 2010 09:33:24 you wrote:
> Hello Stephen,
> 
> Le vendredi 19 mars 2010 à 23:07 -0600, Stephen McCracken a écrit :
> > Hello SciLab folks,
> > 
> > Your GSoC ideas page proposes a project to "provide a version of Scilab
> > based on Eigen".  Can you provide some additional details about that? 
> > Which parts of the Scilab code base would Eigen replace, and what would
> > the possible benefits be?
> 
> This idea is to replace the underlying linear algebra library which are
> BLAS/LAPACK by Eigen.
> I wrote this quick page describing this:
> http://wiki.scilab.org/Contributor_-_Eigen
> Don't hesitate if you need anything on this page.
> 
> To tell you the truth, since I have no idea of the performance gain on
> this library, a proposal about this subject should have some proof of
> concept.
> 
> Sylvestre