RcppBlaze

Overview

Blaze is an open-source, high-performance C++ math library for dense and sparse arithmetic. With its state-of-the-art Smart Expression Template implementation Blaze combines the elegance and ease of use of a domain-specific language with HPC-grade performance, making it one of the most intuitive and fastest C++ math libraries available. The Blaze library offers:

• high performance through the integration of BLAS libraries and manually tuned HPC math kernels
• vectorization by SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4, AVX, AVX2, AVX-512, FMA, and SVML
• parallel execution by OpenMP, C++11 threads and Boost threads (Boost threads is disables in RcppBlaze)
• the intuitive and easy to use API of a domain specific language
• unified arithmetic with dense and sparse vectors and matrices
• thoroughly tested matrix and vector arithmetic
• completely portable, high quality C++ source code

The RcppBlaze package includes the header files from the Blaze library with disabling some functionalities related to link to the thread and system libraries which make RcppBlaze be a header-only library. Therefore, users do not need to install Blaze and the dependency Boost. Blaze is licensed under the New (Revised) BSD license, while RcppBlaze (the ‘Rcpp’ bindings/bridge to Blaze) is licensed under the GNU GPL version 2 or later, as is the rest of Rcpp.

Note that since Blaze has committed to C++14 which does not used by most R users from version 3.0, we will use the version 2.6 of Blaze which is C++98 compatible to support the most compilers and system.

Installation

You can install:

• the stable version from CRAN with

  install.packages("RcppBlaze")

• the latest development version from github with

  install.packages("devtools")
  devtools::install_github("ChingChuan-Chen/RcppBlaze")

If you encounter a bug, please file a reproducible example on github.

Authors

Chingchuan Chen, Klaus Iglberger, Georg Hager, Christian Godenschwager, Tobias Scharpff

License

GPL (>= 2)