Advances in the Development of a High-Level Matrix Language

• Activity Number: 553
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Computing
• Author(s): Luis Frank* and Guillermo Frank
• Companies: University of Buenos Aires and University of Buenos Aires
• Keywords: Matrix Language ; Software ; Linear Algebra

Abstract

MINI is a computer program (written entirely in standard C) designed to solve matrix operations using scripts whose syntax practically emulates the traditional mathematical notation. The comparison of MINI´s first version against equivalent software showed that MINI had a higher computing speed than that of other well-known software, at least for solving linear systems or for inverting large matrices. However, MINI's first version lacked many features of other popular software such as the possibility to operate with blocks of matrices or to extract eigenvalues and eigenvectors. In the paper that follows we describe how such possibilities were incorporated into a new release of MINI but without losing the original minimalist philosophy of the program. We also compare the speed and accuracy of this new version against that of leading software for scientific computation. Finally we show that even with the new additions MINI outperforms other software justifying therefore the development of new software for matrix operations.