[Fwd: Re: Supporting sparse matrices]

[Ron Boisvert <boisvert@nist.gov>]

Sender: kazar001@umn.edu
Subject: Re: Supporting sparse matrices


please goto SPARSKIT documentation/code in UMN.EDU domain. you can convert 
many of these fortran codes to java in a day/week/month depending on your 
speed of coding. thanks

On Feb 20 2007, Daniel Winterstein wrote:

>Firstly, let me say thank you for making Jama available. The interface 
>is clear and gives me exactly the functionality I wanted. I've found it 
>very useful. And forgive me if this topic has already been discussed to 
>death.
>
>Re. having JAMA as part of Java ("the primary linear algebra package for 
>Java" as the website proposes), I think it would be good to add in a 
>layer of abstraction, in order to support the use of sparse matrices.
>
>Jama itself is tied to working with dense matrices, represented by 
>arrays. This is inappropriate for sparse matrices. Sparse matrices occur 
>naturally in a lot of important problems. Specialised representations 
>and codes can give _orders of magnitude_ speed ups for sparse problems. 
>Anyone who is unfamiliar with the subject, I recommend 
>http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/duff98matrix.html for an excellent intro to 
>computing with sparse matrices.
>
>I would like a linear algebra system which allowed different matrix 
>representations and codes. High-level code should be able to work with 
>any of these without worrying abut what is going on 'under the hood'.
>
>This shouldn't take a great deal of modification. Perhaps as simple as 
>extracting an IMatrix interface  from Matrix, then implementing a simple 
>sparse-matrix to test that this makes sense. It can then be left for 
>others to implement efficient codes for different types of sparse matrix.
>
>Your thoughts?
>- Daniel
>
>-----------------------------------------------------------
>"I know nothing, understand less, & most of that is wrong."
>
>   Daniel Winterstein
>   http://thinktankmaths.co.uk
>  
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