[eigen] alpha6!

[Benoît Jacob <jacob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi List,

Eigen 2.0-alpha6 is released!

Wiki: http://eigen.tuxfamily.org
Tarball: http://download.tuxfamily.org/eigen/eigen-2.0-alpha6.tar.bz2
API: http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/api/

It is now time for eigen1 apps to port to eigen2, as it now supports 
essentially all what eigen1 did.

The changes since alpha5 are huge, there are 160 commits since alpha5, the 
sloccount is now 10975 (up from 6143 in alpha5), so I'm not going to list 
them all here, here is just an overview:

- huge benchmarking and optimization effort by Gael. We now often beat the 
established "big iron" libraries on their own ground, which is, standard 
algorithms on large matrices:
http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Benchmark

- huge vectorization improvements, resulting in much more vectorization, and 
much cleaner, faster, extensible source code.

- Gael made the Geometry module (with homogeneous transforms, rotations, 
quaternions etc).

- Gael started the Sparse module, still experimental and incomplete (probably 
not for 2.0), but showing amazing performance already.

- I made the LU module (in alpha5 it was just a stub).

- I reworked the API for cwise ops, and reimplemented Swap so it automatically 
benefits from the vectorization, unrolling, and traverses arrays only once.

- Gael rewrote the partial reduction stuff.

- I added a little demo, 'mandelbrot', a fractal viewer, demonstrating how 
Eigen can be used purely as a vectorization library.

- I added a quick and dirty Regression module adapted from eigen1. It will 
change before 2.0, though.

- we worked on reducing significantly compilation times.

- many many improvements all over the place by both of us.


I surely forgot a ton of things!

Now I must make a pause to dedicate myself to my new postdoc position at the 
University of Toronto. I'll just be doing what is needed for KDE 4.2, KOffice 
2.0, Avogadro 1.0, OpenBabel 3.0 (to name a few projects which should be 
users of eigen2 in the near future). I think that Gael is going to be busy 
too with his new position and even more so now that he'll be living in the 
same city as his girlfriend again :)

So, to anyone lurking here -- now's a great time to step up and join us! We'd 
be happy to mentor newcomers. Among the jobs you could start with, you could 
write SVD decomposition, improve the QR/eigenvalues stuff in some way, help 
with the Sparse module, revive AltiVec vectorization, help vectorize more 
parts of the code (such as Redux.h and Visitor.h), and the list goes on... 
(yes, we should update the TODO).

Cheers,
Benoit

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