On 03-29-2011, at 12:39 AM, Frank K. wrote: > I did some more research and it looks like there are algorithms that > can be applied to sparse matrices that are more efficient than the > ones used for dense matrices. I'll look into those algorithms more > tomorrow and start putting together a proposal. I think that writing > those alternate algorithms in addition to sparse matrix structures > will make for an interesting proposal, anyway. > > I will start to put together my proposal tomorrow, and look for as > much feedback as I can get!
You need to be careful. Try to find sparse matrix algorithms for symbolic matrices if possible. Not all sparse matrix algorithms work well for symbolic matrices. The point of the algorithms is to eliminate non-zero entries, but with sparse matrices, you can get new non-zero entries with naïve algorithms. So, you'd increase the density. In my mind, just implementing sparse matrix storage is not a GSoC project. In my sparse linear algebra course I took, we implemented one just as part of a class assignment. So, you should be able to do sparse matrix storage in about a week's work (at 40 hours/week) at the worst case. You'll definitely need dedicated sparse matrix algorithms, but hopefully, you can hide the implementation behind the standard interface. So, a sparse matrix and a dense vector multiplication will use a dedicated algorithm to handle that case. Cheers, Tim. --- Tim Lahey PhD Candidate, Systems Design Engineering University of Waterloo http://about.me/tjlahey -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy?hl=en.
