[Colloquium] Talk by Peter Gottschling, TU Dresden on October 24, 2008

[Katie Casey]

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Date: Friday, October 24, 2008
Time: 11:30 a.m.
Place: RY 255

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Speaker:	Peter Gottschling

From:		TU Dresden

Title: Generic High-Performance Nurmerics

Abstract: Recently there has been efforts to integrate concepts into  
the C++
language. Concepts are a kind of interface declarations with
(conditional equational) axioms. Concepts allow demands on template
types to be made explicit, pushing the generic programming methodology
forward. In our work we have specified the properties of algebraic
structures, like semi-groups and fields, in terms of concepts. Thus we
can develop generic linear algebra software providing algorithmic
functionality on the entire set of data types fulfilling the
requirements.

The Matrix Template Library 4 (MTL4) is developed in the spirit
of such generalized mathematical behavior.  It provides dense and sparse
matrix and vector operations for all appropriate numeric types,
e.g. quaternions, intervals, multi-precision.  Matrices and vectors
can be nested arbitrarily.  For instance, the product of a matrix
of raw vector times a matrix of vectors of vectors is performed
automatically as scalar-matrix product of matrix-vector products of
dot products.  Despite the far broader applicability, the performance
of MTL4 is in the range of assembly libraries hand-tuned for each
single platform.

In this presentation, we will briefly illustrate the principles of
generic programming, introduce the intriguing new opportunity to
embed semantic properties into C++ sources, and show their utilization
in MTL4.