[gsoc] Inquiry about Computing/Eigen GSoC project

[Sylvestre Ledru]

Bonjour Gael,

Your email is very appreciated. It would be great if we could find a
good student to work on this.

To tell you the truth, this is a prospective project. Some Google summer
of code projects will produce a finalized and documented project. Here,
I see this project to evaluate the pros/cons of Eigen has a numerical
library. It is clear that the nice syntax is a great advantage.
(BLAS/LAPACK were what 80' had best to offer).

But if the performances are good enough and it simplifies the code and
maintenance, we could switch... Especially if we find a solution to
switch between an Eigen backend and a BLAS/LAPACK one.

Thanks for the proposal of help. If we have a student who proposes this
subject, I will invite you to co-mentor the project (at least to see the
proposal).

Sylvestre
PS: if you have a look to the Scilab's internal, please have a look on
the YaSp branch. It is a reimplementation of the Scilab Kernel (C++
also ;)


Le mercredi 24 mars 2010 à 19:05 +0100, Gael Guennebaud a écrit :
> 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
> 

-- 
-------------------------
Sylvestre Ledru
-------------------------
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