Parallel Extensions to the Matrix Template Library

We present the preliminary design for a C++ template library to enable the compositional construction of matrix classes suitable for high performance numerical linear algebra computations. The library based on our interface definition — the Matrix Template Library (MTL) — is written in C++ and consists of a small number of template classes that can be composed to represent commonly used matrix formats (both sparse and dense) and parallel data distributions. A comprehensive set of generic algorithms provide high performance for all MTL matrix objects without requiring specific functionality for particular types of matrices. We present performance data to demonstrate that there is little or no performance penalty caused by the powerful MTL abstractions.