What is the state of play with C++ and number crunching? (fwd)

[Richard Guenther]

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003, Todd Veldhuizen wrote:

> Hi all, this is a recent post on oon-list inquiring about POOMA and
> its status.  You can reply to oon-list at oonumerics.org if you like.

Uh, oh, cross-list posting follows :)

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 09:33:29 +0100
> From: Drew McCormack <drewmccormack at mac.com>
> To: paul.leopardi at unsw.edu.au
> Cc: oon-list at oonumerics.org
> Subject: Re: [oon-list] What is the state of play with C++ and number
>     crunching?
>
> > POOMA is still under active development. See
> > http://www.codesourcery.com/pooma/pooma and the pooma-dev mailing list:
> > http://www.codesourcery.com/pooma/pooma_development
>
> This leads to another question: Is there anything wrong with POOMA?
> Despite the fact that it seems to be a very extensive library, it
> doesn't get mentioned much. Is it slow? Difficult to use?

I've been playing with POOMA for about one and a half year now and still
am there.  It's easy to use if you stick to the basic features like
data parallel expressions and arrays, it gets tricky if you want to
explore the advanced features like the Field infrastructure as that seems
to be in not a very good shape.

For performance - if you have a good optimizing C++ compiler (you
desperately need very good inlining and loop optimization) performance is
not slower than other OO libraries. Just ask, if you want to have more
details.

It's slow at compiling, it's currently slow (for me) in MPI mode (which
uses the Cheetah library), the threads package it could use (Smarts)
doesnt compile.  But things will improve, I have some native OpenMP and
MPI work done.

Richard.

--
Richard Guenther <richard dot guenther at uni-tuebingen dot de>
WWW: http://www.tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de/~rguenth/