Noob questions before migrating from Eigen to Blaze

[Ecolss Logan]

Hi guys, until recently I encountered this wonderful lib and really impressed by the great work done in Blaze!

In the past my team have been using Eigen as the primary option, and now we’re about to start some new projects, so considering other options, and found Blaze.

So far, compared to Eigen, looks like Blaze is quite good in terms of performance. But still some questions need to be addressed before we make our final decision,

1. How easy is it for Blaze to work with pybind11?

   1. Since we need to expose our project as python, and often work with numpy, so being able to easily expose functionalities via pybind11 is quite important to us.
   2. As said in pybind11 doc, it has built-in support for Eigen → numpy arrays, so we wonder if for Blaze, it’s also easy to do that?

2. Support of n-dimensional tensors?

   1. Looks like in Blaze, we have good support for vectors and 2-d matrices, we’d like to know about things like 3-d or n-d tensors?

Thanks!

[Klaus Iglberger]

Hi Ecolss!

Thanks for the feedback, we try our best to make this a special library. To answer your questions:

1. So far there is unfortunately no support for pybind11. We are still hoping for community support to help us with implementing this feature. If the performance results are convincing enough, we would be very happy if you could try to set this up and provide a pull request to enable the support. We would very much appreciate the help!
2. We are currently working on native support for N-dimensional tensors. Again, the focus is on performance and parallelization, which however requires some development time. Until this is officially released, please use the blaze_tensor extension for Blaze. It provides 3D tensors with many special operations and perfectly integrates with Blaze. It is currently maintained by the Stellar group, which is also responsible for HPX.

I hope this helps. In case you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

Best regards,

Klaus!

[Ecolss Logan]

Hi Klaus, it’s good to have answers from you, thanks a lot!