Re: GSoC 2017 project -- Speeding up tensor contraction in Octave

[Susi Lehtola]

On 02/28/2017 12:58 AM, Somesh Singh wrote:
> Hi All
>
> Tensor contraction is a widely used operation that comes up quite often
> when performing operations on tensors. It is widely used in many domains
> such as analysis of chemical compounds. There are a lot of ongoing
> efforts to speed-up tensor contraction.
> Many of the softwares for numerical computation have sound
> implementations of tensor contraction. In this light, I believe it will
> be a good idea to have a fast implementation of tensor contraction in
> Octave for muti-core systems, since tensor contraction offers a lot of
> scope for parallelism. I would like to propose this as a project for
> GSoC 2017 and get involved with it.
> Please share your thoughts on the suggestion.

What would be the scope of this? Tensor contractions are typically 
handled using BLAS calls by permuting the contracted indices to either 
the start or the end, and then calling dgemv or dgemm to get the result. 
These would be AFAIK pretty straightforward to loop-parallellize.

There are recent software developments that are able to do the tensor 
contraction without the permutations, but these basically involve novel 
implementations of BLAS...
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Mr. Susi Lehtola, PhD             Chemist Postdoctoral Fellow
address@hidden   Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
http://www.helsinki.fi/~jzlehtol  USA
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