[rescue] Vector library

[Joshua D Boyd]

Has anyone ever seen or thought of a cross platform vector library?  I
know that some exist, but what about one that works on plain Pentium
Classics, but can also take advantage of 3D Now, Altivec, and VIS,
while also scaling up to supporting Crays?

I know that when looking around there are a lot of cross platform
libraries that don't support any sort of vector processing unit.
Further, on some platforms, you have to program the low level in
assembly (I've seen nothing to suggest otherwise for either Intel and
AMD chips), but others provide nice libraries (like Cray and OS X).
It'd be nice to have one library that would work for everything.

This is just one thought that keeps haunting me when I think about
trying to make a distributed processing system for my growing
collection of dissimilar machines.  I have a pair of dual P2 machines
(MMX is pretty much worthless for this library though), and an
Ultra1.  So that is to sorts of different optimizations that would
work.  Then, processing could also be split across numerous HP
PA-RISC, Sparc, 68k, and PPC machines.  I hope to eventually add both
G4 and R5000 machines to the group, which have their own way of
optimizing for vector math.

I have my own vector library, but it only has what functions I use, so
would probably be nearly worthless for people doing other sorts of
work, like signal processing.  I maintain it because I haven't seen
anything else that can easily be dropped into a project without
creating a seperate library that adds build complexity, and requires
more storage space.  Once I move away from the schools machines, I may
find I have no desire to keep maintaining this library though, unless
I start adding machine specific optimizationss.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd