Re: Please implement typical functionality for sparse matrices

[Patrick Alken <alken at colorado dot edu>]

Moving this over to gsl-discuss since its not a bug.

I would like to expand support for sparse matrices also. Ideally I would
like to see GSL support the proposed Sparse BLAS standard
(https://math.nist.gov/spblas/) which would likely address the points
you raise below. I had some preliminary discussions a few months back
with the maintainer of librsb (a sparse matrix library which fully
implements the sparse BLAS standard, http://librsb.sourceforge.net/). In
principle we might be able to port a lot of that code since it is a LGPL
library. However the main issue is time.

I am currently the only active GSL developer and have quite limited time
these days. I would like to see more people work on these things and
contribute to GSL, but I see few people volunteer. If you can write good
code and know about sparse matrices, please consider working on these
issues yourself and contributing a patch. Otherwise it will likely take
me a long time to get to this :). But this is a relatively high priority
item for me since I work with sparse matrices frequently in my own work.

Thanks,
Patrick

On 07/12/2018 02:52 PM, David Cortes wrote:
> The function for matrix multiplication for sparse matrices
> (gsl_spblas_dgemm) currently only works when both inputs are in column-
> compressed format. It would be straightforward to expand it to cover
> also row-compressed matrices (without transposing them).
>
> As well, the spmatrix module supports convertion of
> coordinates/triplets formats to row- and column-compressed, but it
> doesn't support convertion from a compressed format to
> coordinates/triplets.
>
> This makes it also problematic to perform basic algebra on matrices
> which might later get multiplied.
>
>