On Friday, 14 August 2015 at 19:19:24 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
One concern I have is the choice of MKL, which due to cost and
license reasons, many developers will not have on all (or even
any) of their machines.
I don't work with sparse matrices often so I do not know which
libraries are most popular, but at a minimum I think it is
necessary to say you can use it with a popular open source
library. Given the importance of MKL, it would be a bad idea to
not offer a compatible format, but it would be equally bad to
focus on only MKL.
I agree. MKL is expensive. OpenBLAS is supposed have comparable
performance, more or less, and it is free. Alternately, ATLAS can
be used to build BLAS on many different systems.
I would also distinguish between the low level API like BLAS and
OpenBLAS and higher level APIs. Good higher level APIs allow
drop-in replacement of lower level APIs (e.g. Armadillo).
