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Date:6 Jan 2005 19:05:26 -0000 
Subject:The new mathematical facilities available in Poplog 
From:Aaron Sloman 
Volume-ID: 

Here is more information about the new facilities included with
the popvision package, mentioned in my previous message.

These three
    LIB ARRPACK
    LIB LAPACK
    LIB LAPOP

make available a very rich collection of array manipulation facilities
and mathematical facilities including the BLAS and LAPACK linear algebra
packages, all now accessible interactively from pop11.

For more information see

    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/popvision/help/arrpack

    LIB * ARRPACK is an array processing package for Pop-11. It provides
    efficient procedures to carry out arithmetic and logical operations
    on elements of real and complex arrays. A whole array or a subset of
    its elements may be processed in a single procedure call. ARRPACK is
    restricted to operations in which each array element is treated
    separately from other elements of the same array, such as the
    element-by-element addition of two arrays. (Operations where each
    element is processed along with its neighbours, such as convolution,
    Fourier transforms and matrix operations, are provided by other
    libraries.) A higher-level interface to these procedures may be
    provided in future.

    http://www.netlib.org/blas/faq.html

    The BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) are high quality
    "building block" routines for performing basic vector and matrix
    operations. Level 1 BLAS do vector-vector operations, Level 2 BLAS
    do matrix-vector operations, and Level 3 BLAS do matrix-matrix
    operations. Because the BLAS are efficient, portable, and widely
    available, they're commonly used in the development of high quality
    linear algebra software, LINPACK and LAPACK for example.


    http://www.netlib.org/lapack/

    LAPACK is written in Fortran77 and provides routines for solving
    systems of simultaneous linear equations, least-squares solutions of
    linear systems of equations, eigenvalue problems, and singular value
    problems. The associated matrix factorizations (LU, Cholesky, QR, SVD,
    Schur, generalized Schur) are also provided, as are related computations
    such as reordering of the Schur factorizations and estimating condition
    numbers. Dense and banded matrices are handled, but not general sparse
    matrices. In all areas, similar functionality is provided for real and
    complex matrices, in both single and double precision.

Anyone who wants all this but does not have blas and lapack for linux
(apparently included in some linux distributions --e.g. redhat 9) can
get rpms for various architectures from

     http://ftp.pld.org.pl/dists/ac/ready/

I guess this should all work eventually in OSX poplog.

Checking it out will be one way of testing the port (since BLAS and
LAPACK libraries appear to be available for OSX).

Unlike some other popular mathematical packages this is all free
and open source, and embedded in a rich AI development environment.

Aaron
===
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/