[eigen] News

[Benoît Jacob <jacob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi List,

(resending as there seems to have been a delivery failure the first time)

Here are some quickies:

* See here the new wiki that will eventually become Eigen's website (of course 
doxygen will still be used for the apidocs):
http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/wiki/
For now it's empty but you can already register an account.

* Related to this, I wonder, should we have a logo/mascot? See the blank area 
in top-left corner of the wiki, it's the area where mediawiki wants to 
display a logo. Do you have any good idea of a mascot? It's not necessary to 
have one, but if we find a good one it's always funny. Let me state my ideas:
  -- I prefer a real mascot (as in "furry") over an abstract logo.
  -- since Eigen does abstract math things, it's all the funnier to have
     a silly animal mascot.
  -- example of good mascots IMHO:
        Tux
        GNU
        The OpenSSH spiky fish
        libcaca
  -- what animal could we use?
        none at all, mascots are lame? (don't hesitate to tell)
        a shadok (too French-specific? Copyright issues?)
        a ghost (represents immateriality of math?)
        a pig (no reason whatsoever but it's funny with flappy ears.
               one reason might be that it will eat all you throw at it,
               representing eigen's aim to be all-purpose)
        ...add your idea!
        
* development has been ongoing at warp speed with Gael and me; however we're 
now making a little pause so alpha5 will have to wait a bit. Among the 
improvements:
  -- we (mostly Gael) added to Core virtually all the features that were
     originally planned for the Array module. The rationale is that they're
     very useful to implement all sorts of algorithms.
  -- we now have rather firm plans on hot topics: vectorization (Gael has
     some proof-of-concept code but the full solution relies on big changes
     that I still have to make), parallelization (Gael alrady committed
     proof-of-concept code using OpenMP, see EvalOMP.h), cache-friendliness
     (again Gael added a cache-friendly path in Product.h), but we also
     now know that for really big matrices the only good solution is to let
     BLAS/LAPACK be used as a backend for heavy operations. Since Eigen's
     expression templates have far more expressive power than BLAS it's
     impossible to use BLAS as a backend for _all_ operations, but what is 
     possible is to use BLAS/LAPACK for _certain_ _common_ heavy operations,
     such as matrix product, inversion, LU, QR, etc.
  -- Lots of improvements in the architecture, so the total number of LOC
     didn't increase that much despite the additions, and we support GCC
     3.3 to 4.3 as well as ICC.

* In some time we'll be giving an interview on Eigen on a developer's news 
website, so stay tuned :)

Cheers,

Benoit

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