2011/5/31 Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda@gmail.com>:

Hi Nicolas,

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 1:22 PM, Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice@gmail.com> wrote:

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I can tell you about Smallapack as author.

First advantage: using a state of the art robust library LAPACK + BLAS is the core of Matlab/Octave/Scilab/R/etc... It is robust in terms of API stability, numerical stability, and number of bugs (try finding known ones).

Second advantage: combine advantages of - a fast and efficient number crunching library for low level primitives - and our favourite IDE for higher level code (interpreter debugger browser etc...) That's the exact strategy developped by Matlab. As a bonus, Smalltalk interpreter is faster than Matlab, and don't ask me about Matlab language design (non) choices ;) To reach Matlab core preformances, you need an optimized version of BLAS (ATLAS for example). I imagine versions of these libraries could exploit multi-core parallelism (but I did not check status of http://www.netlib.org/scalapack/).

Good news, I have a working Smallapack in both Dolphin and VW. Unfortunately, the main drawback is that Squeak/Pharo is not in that list.

First, Smallapack may crash the image in Squeak/Pharo... I've not found the reasons, but suspect some FFI problems. Maybe I should try using a plugin rather than FFI. That seems doable since low level FFI code is generated automatically from Lapack comments. It's just a matter of changing code generator to generate slang rather than FFI...

How easy is this to test?  What does one have to install?  Is it all freely available?  I'd like to find time to test this in the ReentrantFFIPlugin.  Seems like a good test case.

http://www.squeaksource.com/Smallapack.html - is MIT - has a few tests For compiling 16+ args, there is a Compiler mcz in the repository (a few versions back trunk, so a merge might be necessary). This is useless if you can upgrade to 31 args. See the wiki tab for load order. At my last attempts, MC failed to initialize correctly; if a debugger opens on a nil class var, then try redoing some initialize... I may help this week end (thursday thru saturday). Nicolas

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Second drawback is that loading Smallapack in a Squeak/Pharo image requires some pre-requisite. This is because LAPACK has the bad property of having functions with more than 16 arguments. Squeak/Pharo Compiler cannot handle methods with that many arguments. I have a Compiler hack ready for handling this case.

That's easy to fix.  The bytecode set supports up to 31 args.  e just need to push fixes to the compiler front-end right?

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I have not automated the process because I'm not so sure that Gofer/Metacello are good for installing such hack (Compiler overrides may seem evil). But I can help any good will.

So, if you're after an off-the-shelf library working out of the box, Smallapack is not OK. However, if above goals fit yours, and you're willing to help, I'll be happy to revive the project and inject a few hours into it.

Nicolas

best, Eliot

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2011/5/31 Ignacio Vivona <altobarba@gmail.com>:

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Hi all! I'm currently planning on doing some work related to resolving partial differential equations (shallow water) in pharo. I'm seeing a couple of project for dealing with vectors, matrices and some other math things. http://www.squeaksource.com/DHBNumerical.html http://www.squeaksource.com/MatrixPlugin.html http://www.squeaksource.com/Numerics.html http://www.squeaksource.com/Smallapack.html Has anyone any experience working with these? Also I'm looking at Mathmorphs (does it work in pharo?) http://mate.dm.uba.ar/~caniglia/mathMorphs.html and DrGEO http://community.ofset.org/index.php/DrGeo for doing the graphical interaction. If someone knows of some other project related please guide me. Thanks in advance, Ignacio Vivona