LinBox Pow Wow April 20th, 2007

Agenda

• Parallelism in LinBox
  • CRT
  • Low level operations
  • Optimizing for multicore processor evironments
  • Threads vs. SMP
  • Automatic tuning and load balancing
• Mailing List Archives
• Full time/Professional maintainer for LinBox codebase?
  • Funding?
• New Algorithm/Features wish list
  • Block methods
  • GF2 implementations
  • Matrix Polynomials (any users?)
  • (vote on) make check to build all examples
  • Benchmark problems?

Minutes

1. Dinner was extensively discussed. Not time to discuss beer. Vote early and often
2. Introduced everyone to these trac pages (for developers / wiki documentation)
3. Clement is going to migrate the Linbox Yahoo! group to Google Groups (for users and discussion)
4. Parallelism discussion
5. Werner suggested looking at automatic code tuning for multicores. Dave added this might be particularly useful for Sparse Matrix-Vector product. (e.g. http://bebop.cs.berkeley.edu/oski/ )
6. Mark and Jeremy discussed FPGA
7. Break for Lunch
8. More parallel talk.
9. Usuability issues discussed:
   1. Makefiles should be examples
   2. Two types of users:
      • People who want to do computations (SAGE integration targets them?)
      • People who want to use the library in their software (Is this our target audience?)