Jack,
Thanks. Yes, in theory for some one who knows either elemental or PETSc
well doing the interface should not be a long project. But if they don't know
either it would be a long learning curve first.
Barry
On Apr 5, 2012, at 10:37 AM, Jack Poulson wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 10:19 AM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>
> On Apr 5, 2012, at 9:54 AM, Jack Poulson wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Jack Poulson <jack.poulson at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 8:02 AM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> >
> > Parallel dense we know very little about and cannot write those
> > routines, sadly there are no decently supported parallel dense matrix
> > general purpose libraries out there that we can use (and no Scalapack,
> > plapack and elemental do not count as decent AND supported) so it is
> > unlikely WE will write the MPIDENSE versions of these routines. Though if
> > someone else writes them we would be happy to include them. So basically
> > for parallel dense I have no suggestions.
> >
> >
> > If you let me know what your major complaints are, I'll look into them.
> >
> > Jack
> >
> > Forwarding to Jed and Matt; seriously, let me know what your complaints
> > are. If I can, I will fix them.
> >
> > Jack
>
> Jack,
>
> I apologize, I was too quick to dismiss elemental. We went to the effort
> to do the MPIDENSE interface for PLAPACK and that ended up being a complete
> waste and left a bad taste in my mouth since I consider that wasted time when
> we could have done something else.
>
>
> No offense taken; it is understandable that PLAPACK did not meet PETSc's
> rigorous development standards, as it was closer to a research code. With
> that said, the reason I wrote Elemental is that I wanted a robust linear
> algebra package that made use of PLAPACK's insights (ala exposing matrix
> distributions as objects).
>
> Given that you had a bad experience with PLAPACK, perhaps the best assurance
> I can give you is that I am actively dogfooding Elemental in my other
> projects (see http://bitbucket.org/poulson/clique and
> http://bitbucket.org/poulson/psp). In addition, van de Geijn has a student
> working on extending Elemental's matrix-matrix multiplication code to more
> sophisticated distribution schemes. I _highly_ doubt that you will find a bug
> in Elemental's matrix-matrix multiplication, but, if you do, I can assure you
> that I will fix it within a few hours. The code is quite simple:
> http://code.google.com/p/elemental/source/browse/#hg%2Finclude%2Felemental%2Fbasic%2Flevel3%2FGemm
>
> So we could try again with Elemental but its a question of having a
> competent person to do the interface efficiently. Perhaps you have a student
> or someone you know that knows elemental we could hire for a short time to do
> an interface and see how it goes?
>
>
> Unfortunately I am still just a lowly Ph.D. student (but hopefully that will
> change in December). I would be happy to try to help, and _may_ find the time
> to write the interface myself, but, until graduation, I can't promise more
> than maintenance. I can talk with a few folks that might be interested, but I
> would think that this should only take a few days of work, not anything that
> warranted an appointment.
>
> Jack
