Re: sparse matrices

[Paul Kienzle]

On Apr 12, 2004, at 4:08 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> For starters, I would just like to be able to store data in a sparse
> format and have some basic operations (assignment, indexing,
> arithmetic ops, etc.).  It seems that the SuperLU package provides
> some code for these things, but again, I think the implementation
> would need a lot of work before it could be included as a part of
> Octave.

SuperLU solver is failing for rectangular operations.  I had to comment
them out of my tests.  Also according to Gupta (comparison of general
solvers p304, from http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~agupta/wsmp.html)
SuperLU is not particularly fast or accurate.  MUMPS performs well,
but it is fortran 90 --- I don't know if the g95 compiler is up to the 
task,
but the status page (http://g95.sourceforge.net/g95_status.html) looks
promising.  UMFPACK is an obvious contender, especially given that
Matlab is using it.

> Does anyone know of some good general-purpose code for handling sparse
> matrix storage?

As Andy says, he has mostly implemented the generic operations
himself, and SuperLU isn't doing much other than providing the solvers.

Paul Kienzle
address@hidden