Re: new ATLAS homepage

[R Clint Whaley <rwhaley@cs.utk.edu>]

> One rather serious
>issue, IMHO, is that no one apparently understands the guts of atlas
>(i.e. outside of kernels) except you :-).  

The kernel of such a document is ATLAS/doc/atlas_devel.ps in the newest
release.  Right now, all it does is tell you how to setup to get ATLAS
with CVS on SourceForge.  The plan, though, is to expand this guy.  It
is available as part of the CVS checkout (AtlasBase/TexDoc/).  It is my
hope that as other people discover things, they will add them to the .tex,
and we'll open source the developer info as well . . .

If people would write down what they have learned in adding a particular
feature, and I'd occasionally come along and edit, I think we'd eventually
have a pretty good guide . . .

My plan is by the time I'm back at school, all BLAS have the option of being
tuned, so that kernel contribution alone will be adequate to keep ATLAS/BLAS
current, with new development expanding us beyond the BLAS.  Additional lapack
routines, and perhaps additional blas-like ops are obvious possible new
developments, but there's lots other things that may be interesting . . .

On this front, Peter Soendergaard just finished adding a recursive TRTRI,
running roughly 5-15% faster than lapack, which will be available in the
next developer release (CVS has it now).

If anyone is interested, Peter has posted some pretty graphs at:

   http://www.cs.utk.edu/~soender/atlas/trtri.html

I have a theory (untested, though testing would not be that hard) explaining
the ILAENV results, if anyone gets curious . . .

I think we will eventually want a place of consolidated performance links on
the developer page for anyone who wants to show their results, but we haven't
gotten around to putting it up yet . . .

For those interested in what's being worked on, I'm trying to use the
source feature tracker to do this.  If you go to:

   https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=379485&group_id=23725&func=browse

you can see what's happening.  If you browse for STATUS: CLOSED, you see
the things that have been completed.  You can post your own ideas/feature
request here as well, though don't be suprised if you are nominated as the
leading candidate to do anything you suggest :)

All the lists and so-on on can be found by clicking around from the homepage.
One way is to go to the developer page, then click on
   [SourceForge Summary Page]
which gives you a guide to many of the SF facilities . . .

Cheers,
Clint

http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net
http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/devel/