[pooma-dev] Some POOMA questions

[Richard Guenther]

On 28 Oct 2003, Tarjei Knapstad wrote:

> Hi!
>
> (I hope I'm not posting this to the wrong forum, if so please redirect
> me.)
>
> I'm currently in the process of evaluating POOMA for use in our software
> and I have some questions:
>
> 1. Is POOMA suitable for use as a linear algebra package? Or should I be

I would look elsewhere, f.i. at the PETSc library for this sort of use.
I'm at the moment looking at using PETSc for solving of (ono-)linear
systems while doing explicit stuff in POOMA. Stay tuned for some adaptor
classes.

> looking elsewhere, like the Blitz++ library, and do the parallelization
> myself? I've done some minor experimentation using Array<2> as a basic
> matrix of doubles, but I haven't yet been able to find any functionality
> for doing basic stuff like computing a matrix product, Hadamar product
> etc. Am I not looking in the right place? I'll also need basic matrix
> decompositions like LDU, QR and LDU which brings me to:
>
> 2. How hard is it to implement new algorithms for the POOMA containers?
> Even though I'm very confident with template code (including expression
> templates), I must say that at this point the POOMA code has me more or
> less baffled.

Well - its easy to implement them, but probably a lot harder to get them
working at acceptable speed. Also doing f.i. vector x matrix with Array<1>
and Array<2> is not supported by any data-parallel operation I know of.

> 3. Is there any work being done to bring SMARTS up to speed? For
> parallell execution I'd like to try running on a MOSIX cluster, using
> SMARTS to do the threading, but the current SMARTS in CVS fails to
> compile the same way it did when I tried it briefly last year (there's
> some conflict with pthreads)

Still the same - I have some work on OpenMP support in my queue (but need
to finalize reduction support) that will perhaps make SMARTS unnecessary.
I myself use cheetah for MPI parallelization on a workstation cluster.

> 4. About licensing: While POOMA is currently free for commercial use,
> are there any plans to make it a commercial package down the road? Not
> that we mind paying for software, but I'm a bit reluctant to start using
> something which may suddenly end up becoming an expensive vendor
> lock-in.

At least all "old" versions would stay open, and I suspect in the above
case I would start a fork for further open POOMA development. It would be
interesting to know if the future ongoing work (which was announced here a
few weeks ago) is done in public or closed as contract work.

> Also, does/will CodeSourcery offer commercial support for
> POOMA, something like you currently offer for gcc?

They state that from their website, so... - but I dont know.

Hope this clarifies something,

 Richard.

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