BLAS/LAPACK Ecosystem Enhancement
Description of the project: BLAS/LAPACK are important scientific computing libraries. There are many optimized implementations aside the standard netlib implementation. To make the BLAS/LAPACK backends switchable at runtime without any recompilation, the update-alternatives system is incorporated. To date, the mechanism is working well, but there are still some aspects that needs to be improved. For example, the
- documentation on this mechanism and how to maintain it;
- some new implementations are still not packaged yet;
- we need to update science team policy and add some lintian hints about BLAS/LAPACK to prevent people from falling into the pitfalls;
- we need to finish the deprecation of libcblas.so; and so on.
Confirmed Mentor: Sébastien Villemot
How to contact the mentor: sebastien@debian.org
Confirmed co-mentors: Andreas Tille
Deliverables of the project:
- better environment for BLAS/LAPACK users and upper layer applications.
- documentation about debian's BLAS/LAPACK ecosystem.
- new section about BLAS/LAPACK in science team policy.
- new lintian checks.
- getting rid of libcblas.so
Desirable skills:
- scientific computing background.
- C programming language and at least one scripting language, optionally FORTRAN.
What the intern will learn:
- how debian packaging works.
- in which way does debian differ from other distros.
- more familar with the fundamental linear algebra libraries.
Application tasks: Fix a bug in some of the relevant packages
Related project of GSOC 2019: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Blas-lapack-switch
Existing documentation https://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/LinearAlgebraLibraries