I would recommend these documents:

http://scicomp.stackexchange.com/questions/351/recommendations-for-a-usable-fast-c-matrix-library

http://code.google.com/p/blaze-lib/wiki/Benchmarks

Blaze is a new library and it exploits both expressions templates at small
sizes
and blas/lapack backend at large sizes (both static and dynamic sizing).

Eigen development has slowed down over the last 3 years. I like the idea of
having a self-container
and only-headers library, but sometimes reinventing the wheel is not a good
(e.g. emulate blas/lapack).
Also, because some aliasing issues, it is delicate to include eigen objects
as class attributes.

I can confirm that installing Armadillo is painful if you don't want to
patch CMakeLists.txt.


Probably Eigen is still a good choice, but I would take a look at Blaze too.


 Simone




2013/9/19 Anders Logg <[email protected]>

> On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 10:14:43AM +0100, Garth N. Wells wrote:
> > I've been thinking about switching to Eigen
> > (http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/) from Armadillo
> > (http://arma.sourceforge.net/) in DOLFIN to handle dense matrix/vector
> > problems. The reasoning is:
> >
> > 1. Armadillo is a pain to install (getting it to link properly to BLAS
> > being the main problem)
> > 2. Eigen header only, but can link to BLAS if desired
> > 3. Eigen uses row-major or column-major storage, whereas Armadillo
> > offers only column major. Column-major makes interaction with the
> > GenericTensor::get/set functions clumsy with Armadillo, often
> > requiring copying (this is the most pressing reason for me proposing a
> > change now).
> > 4. Eigen has some good serial sparse linear algebra support
> >
> > Performance wise, from the net there doesn't seem to be much in it.
> > Armadillo does generally requires a good BLAS library to get good
> > performance whereas Eigen doesn't. Eigen has a richer API. Longer
> > term, we could remove the uBLAS interface (which is slow) and
> > implement Eigen as a linear algebra backend.
> >
> > Any opinions/experiences, or is anyone attached to Armadillo?
>
> No objections.
>
> --
> Anders
> _______________________________________________
> fenics mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://fenicsproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fenics
>
_______________________________________________
fenics mailing list
[email protected]
http://fenicsproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fenics

Reply via email to