Some POOMA questions

[Tarjei Knapstad]

Hi!

(I hope I'm not posting this to the wrong forum, if so please redirect
me.)

I'm currently in the process of evaluating POOMA for use in our software
and I have some questions:

1. Is POOMA suitable for use as a linear algebra package? Or should I be
looking elsewhere, like the Blitz++ library, and do the parallelization
myself? I've done some minor experimentation using Array<2> as a basic
matrix of doubles, but I haven't yet been able to find any functionality
for doing basic stuff like computing a matrix product, Hadamar product
etc. Am I not looking in the right place? I'll also need basic matrix
decompositions like LDU, QR and LDU which brings me to:

2. How hard is it to implement new algorithms for the POOMA containers?
Even though I'm very confident with template code (including expression
templates), I must say that at this point the POOMA code has me more or
less baffled.

3. Is there any work being done to bring SMARTS up to speed? For
parallell execution I'd like to try running on a MOSIX cluster, using
SMARTS to do the threading, but the current SMARTS in CVS fails to
compile the same way it did when I tried it briefly last year (there's
some conflict with pthreads)

4. About licensing: While POOMA is currently free for commercial use,
are there any plans to make it a commercial package down the road? Not
that we mind paying for software, but I'm a bit reluctant to start using
something which may suddenly end up becoming an expensive vendor
lock-in. Also, does/will CodeSourcery offer commercial support for
POOMA, something like you currently offer for gcc?

Thanks in advance,
--
Tarjei Knapstad