[SciPy-dev] sparse matrix support status

[Nils Wagner]

On Tue, 22 Nov 2005 15:05:10 -0500
  Jonathan Guyer <guyer at nist.gov> wrote:
> 
> On Oct 7, 2005, at 4:00 PM, I wrote:
> 
>>  regardless, pysparse is BSD
>> licensed, so it's perfectly legal to use his code to 
>>improve
>> scipy.sparse (assuming that rigorous benchmarking 
>>determines that there
>> are, in fact, improvements to be made). We'll do some 
>>tests and, if a
>> merge is warranted, we'll run it by Roman out of 
>>courtesy.
> 
> I've finally done some benchmarking of scipy.sparse and 
>PySparse and 
> posted my results and comments on plone[*]:
> 
>     <http://www.scipy.org/wikis/featurerequests/SparseSolvers>
> 
> Bottom line is that, with a couple of exceptions, 
>PySparse is both 
> faster and less memory intensive than SciPy. I don't 
>know whether 
> anything can be lifted from PySparse to improve SciPy's 
>implementation.
> 
> [*] Not that this comes as a surprise to anybody here, 
>but the SciPy 
> plone wiki is scary slow. I also couldn't get it to 
>accept reST, even 
> though I've seen other people using it there.
> -- 
> Jonathan E. Guyer, PhD
> Metallurgy Division
> National Institute of Standards and Technology
> <http://www.metallurgy.nist.gov/>
> 
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Jonathan,

I had a short look on your comments.
Actually, you can import matrices given in matrixmarket 
format.

Help on function mmread in module scipy.io.mmio:

mmread(source)
     Reads the contents of a Matrix Market file 'filename' 
into a matrix.

     Inputs:
       source    - Matrix Market filename (extensions 
.mtx, .mtz.gz)
                   or open file object.

     Outputs:

       a         - sparse or full matrix

Are you aware of a sparse eigensolver for scipy ?

Nils