Re: Wrapper for vectorized math libraries

[Dan Davis]

On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 2:05 PM, Christopher Hulbert
<address@hidden> wrote:
\>
> Have you looked at the vector, signal, and image processing library
> (VSIPL) [1]? There is also VSIPL++ which is a specification (serial
> and parallel specifications) [1]. This was created initially under
> DARPA funding to define a portable high-performance API for a number
> of computational functions. I have at times used ACML, MKL, vanilla
> BLAS and LAPACK, FFTW, etc. as backends for that specification. You
> will also find presentations from Miriam Leeser from Northwestern I
> think who did work in using FPGA and GPU backends in VSIPL. GTRI also
> has a GPU release of VSIPL. The reference implementation provides the
> unoptomized versions you were looking at implementing when not
> compiled with a backend. Unless you want to design your own, you may
> find it nice starting from something established, and I do not some
> commercial companies using VSIPL++ in production environments.

Thanks for the info.  I may have seen VSIPL before, but it wasn't on
my mind when I started working on this.  As nice as it is in terms of
a middleware, it misses the point.  What I am working towards is lower
level than that with far fewer functions.  The even bigger point is
that I would like run-time selection (not compile time) of the best
available library.  That way something like Octave, which is packaged
via .deb, .rpm, etc. type packages, could link in to the vectorized
math functionality that is available on the machine.  So if someone
has ACML or IMKL, software like Octave could take advantage of that
without recompiling.

For things like blas, fftw, etc., which have standardized function
calls, I can force that run-time selection if I want using LD_PRELOAD
and listing whichever libraries I want to use.  However, for the
common math functions, no standard calls exists, and, thus as far as
I'm aware, no run-time selection ability exists.

Regards,

Dan Davis