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

[Lorensen, William E (CRD)]

vnl is being used on the Insight project also.

-----Original Message-----
From: David Gobbi [mailto:dgobbi at irus.rri.ca]
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2001 2:10 PM
To: Miller, James V (CRD)
Cc: Blezek, Daniel J (CRD); 'vtk-developers at public.kitware.com'
Subject: RE: [vtk-developers] Fitting code and it's place in VTK


Hi Jim,

I've taken a brief look at vxl/vnl, and it appears to be miles ahead of
clapack in terms of suitability, and also in terms of support.  It even
has an active CVS repository on SourceForge.  I'm guessing that most
people on this list will have already seen it (since vxl uses CMake,
and the vxl people are obviously familiar with VTK).

So I retract my suggestion that clapack be included with VTK.

The thread-safety is a big issue (not that many of the VTK primitives
don't have their own thread-safety issues).  It looks like vxl
uses netlib for some of its underlying matrix operations, however,
and netlib shares the same fortran heritage as clapack.  So at
first glance, it seems that vxl has exactly the same problems with
thread-safety as clapack.

Can someone who is familiar with vxl comment on its thread-safety?

 - David


On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Miller, James V (CRD) wrote:

> 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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