[SciPy-dev] FLENS

[Bill Baxter]

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 5:56 AM, Hoyt Koepke <hoytak at gmail.com> wrote:

> > That's the main advantage of FLENS over Blitz++ from what I
> > understand.  Blitz++ does not use BLAS at all.
>
> FLENS looks really cool, but from my brief look, it doesn't seem like
> it's really a drop in replacement for blitz++.  blitz++ seems to have
> more functionality in terms of slicing and assignment operations that
> I'd associate with arrays, which makes weave.blitz practical.  It
> seems that FLENS is primarily focused on matrix type operations, which
> blitz++ doesn't have, so having a weave.flens package could be really
> useful.  I might have missed something, though -- let me know if I
> did.
>

Yes that is correct, I would say that the main point of FLENS is to provide
convenient access to BLAS and LAPACK.  It has no n-dimensional array types,
just matrix types.  But it does support all of BLAS's triangular and banded
storage schemes.

It has some support for sparse matrices too, but at this point the support
for sparse operations and types is, well, sparse.  Only the CRS storage
scheme is implemented, and only connection with Intel's MKL is supported.
On the FLENS list Michael said he was going to be looking into rounding out
the sparse part of the code, so if anyone is interested in helping out, he'd
probably be interested.

--bb
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