[vtk-developers] Fitting code and it's place in VTK

[Miller, James V (CRD)]

My concern with any of the f2c converted code (clapack, etc.) is that (at first glance) it is not
thread safe. It looks like the fortran "common" blocks were translated into "static" variables in
function and files.



-----Original Message-----
From: Blezek, Daniel J (CRD) 
Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2001 1:51 PM
To: 'David Gobbi'
Cc: 'vtk-developers at public.kitware.com'
Subject: RE: [vtk-developers] Fitting code and it's place in VTK


David,

  I toyed around with clapack, blas and f2c on Tuesday.  blas went in very easily under CMake, but I
abandoned it pending discussion on the mailing list, Kitware, and CRD.  I don't think the mechanics
of adding blas, lapack, etc are difficult, it's defining the interface w/VTK that is the problem.
One of the thoughts is to incorporate vnl, the numerics package from VXL and Insight into VTK.  That
way we have one common numerics package across three different packages.  VXL, Insight, and VTK are
very cross platform, so I know that vnl would fit in well.  Again the question is: do we add a
"VTK-ish" layer to clapack/vnl, or just compile them in for use wherever needed in VTK.

  I have no strong preferences of any numerics package; I just want to solve my problem.

Thanks,
-dan

-----Original Message-----
From: David Gobbi [mailto:dgobbi at irus.rri.ca]
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2001 5:21 PM
To: Blezek, Daniel J (CRD)
Cc: 'vtk-developers at public.kitware.com'
Subject: Re: [vtk-developers] Fitting code and it's place in VTK


On Mon, 10 Sep 2001, Blezek, Daniel J (CRD) wrote:

> 2) where/when/who would like to put some numerical code into VTK 4.0, in a similar way that png,
> zlib, and jpeg were bundled?
>   - this would eliminate the "Numerical Recipes in C" debacle that I just went through
>   - would give VTK uses a great deal more power to do things

I will again give my vote for the blas_lite, dlapack_lite, etc. that are
included in the Python Numeric package (http://numpy.sourceforge.net/).

The code isn't very pretty (most of it has been machine-translated from
fortran to C) but it is API-compatible with the optimized versions of
libblas that are available for many platforms, i.e. cmake can use the
optimized libblas if present, or link to blas_lite otherwise.

Another option is to include cblas and clapack themselves.  Again,
the code isn't pretty, but these are fairly standard tools and are
very well tested.

 - David
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