I'm glad you're bringing something like this to the JVM/Scala-ecosystem.
There are some things that I've been interested in asking for in a high level scientific computing library. If you're planning on continuing your visualization library can you please come up with some solution for layout specification? Whenever I'm plotting something and I spend 30 minutes getting all of the data in order the last thing I want to do is fight with the plotting library's label positions because they overlap. Or if I say "Let me take this plot, add some more stacked subplots, and show different catagories" I don't want my labels to be perfect but my scatters to be given a 10x10 pixel box to draw into.
On the HP/numerical computing side of things have you looked into implicit GPU operation types? Something that would let you queue up operations that can be run on a parallel computing system. Basically describe complex operations with the high-level object's normal operations. The objects aren't actually calculating anything, they just organize a GPU kernel in the background. As the final stage you can turn the
gpumat a(3, 5);
gpumat b(5, 3);
gpumat gpu_op_queue = (a * b) + (a * b) * 5;
function(a, b) operation = gpu_op_queue.compile();
mat output = operation(some_3x5, some_5x3);
In the backend you'd hopefully be able to great your own types like 'cpumat', 'computerclustermat', or 'gpuclustermat'.
If you had some easy way to generically express extremely parallel numerical operations, an abstract way of implementing high-performance back-ends that take those operations and compile them to GPU kernels, and a visualization engine that doesn't feel like it's from the 80s then your library will really take off.
Personally I feel GPU-optimization and fighting with visualization libraries are the two biggest pain points in scientific computing.
There are some things that I've been interested in asking for in a high level scientific computing library. If you're planning on continuing your visualization library can you please come up with some solution for layout specification? Whenever I'm plotting something and I spend 30 minutes getting all of the data in order the last thing I want to do is fight with the plotting library's label positions because they overlap. Or if I say "Let me take this plot, add some more stacked subplots, and show different catagories" I don't want my labels to be perfect but my scatters to be given a 10x10 pixel box to draw into.
On the HP/numerical computing side of things have you looked into implicit GPU operation types? Something that would let you queue up operations that can be run on a parallel computing system. Basically describe complex operations with the high-level object's normal operations. The objects aren't actually calculating anything, they just organize a GPU kernel in the background. As the final stage you can turn the
In the backend you'd hopefully be able to great your own types like 'cpumat', 'computerclustermat', or 'gpuclustermat'.If you had some easy way to generically express extremely parallel numerical operations, an abstract way of implementing high-performance back-ends that take those operations and compile them to GPU kernels, and a visualization engine that doesn't feel like it's from the 80s then your library will really take off.
Personally I feel GPU-optimization and fighting with visualization libraries are the two biggest pain points in scientific computing.