Final Beta & Start of a Competition

Two years ago, the people who developed Math.Net Iridium and dnAnalytics, both open source numerical libraries for .NET, came together with the idea of creating one great numerical library for .NET. Based on our combined experiences, we designed a new library and called it Math.Net Numerics.

During the past two years, with financial support from Microsoft Research and together with some great new developers on the team, we are on the final leg of delivering Math.Net Numerics 1.0: the last release of Math.Net Numerics beta.

The .NET platform is a good place for scientific computing. Modulo a few essential things we'd like to see in the future, e.g. integration with SIMD instructions, the .NET runtime allows us to write fairly efficient numerical code. Nonetheless, there are places where improvements should be possible and we'd like to invite you to help us out.

Starting from today, we're running a contest on writing the most efficient matrix multiplication routine in .NET. We will incorporate the best code into Math.Net Numerics before we release v1.0 of the library.  As a thanks you, the winner will receive a 1500$ prize! (The runner up will win 500$.) The contest rules and benchmark harness are up at http://gemm.codeplex.com/. We hope you enter our competition and share your insights on making the best .NET numerical code out there!

Comments

[trampster]

Can we use Mono.SIMD and run on mono instead because this gives a huge performance boost on this type of operation.

[Math.NET Team]

>Can we use Mono.SIMD and run on mono
No. We'll be using the Microsoft runtime for benchmarking/comparing entries.

[Harry]

I assume that unsafe code is allowed, since MKL, ATLAS providers etc. are unsafe, is that correct?

[Math.NET Team]

>I assume that unsafe code is allowed, since MKL, ATLAS providers etc. are unsafe, is that correct?
No. The contest is for managed (safe) solutions only.