[Matrix-SIG] Quick... Duck! (or: YA Newbie)

[Gregory A. Landrum]

Now that I'm about to embark on a new programming
project, I think I can justify spending some time 
getting more comfortable with Python and NumPy.

Before I do this though, I have a couple of question.

Question 1:
I need more bits and pieces from LAPACK than what 
comes with the NumPY 1.1 tarball I pulled down from 
LLNL yesterday.  More specifically, I need all the 
eigenvalue/vector routines. 
Even more specifically, I need the ones that deal with
the generalized eigenvalue problem. (e.g. zhegv, zheev 
and their relatives).
[Ideally, since one can never be sure which numerical
problems lie on the horizon, I'd have access to all
of lapack... but this is clearly a vast amount of
work.]
I looked and looked, but I couldn't find anything that
looked like it did what I need.  So... my question is:
"Has anyone already done a wrapper for more of lapack
than what shows up in lapack_lite?"  If the answer is
"no", then I'll do it.  Poking through the stuff that
came with NumPy, it looks like it would be "reasonably
straightforward."  (I love learning things by jumping
straight into the guts).

Question 2:
In a happy world, I could arrange for NumPy to use
vendor supplied libraries rather than the generic
versions which come with it.  This would be a particularly
large win for things like BLAS and LAPACK.  So, for 
example, on my AIX machines, I'd like to use (as much
as possible) IBM's BLAS implementations as well as ESSL.
Here's where Konrad Hinsen's warning on the SIG about
a PPro optimized BLAS has me worried:
"Unfortunately the necessary compilation and linking steps are
not totally trivial"
I can deal with nontrivial, but I would like to know if
there is some documentation about how to do things like
this anywhere.

Thanks (in advance) for your help, and thanks
for providing NumPy to the community.

-greg 


---------------------
Dr. Greg Landrum  (landrum@hal9000.ac.rwth-aachen.de)
Institute of Inorganic Chemistry
Aachen University of Technology
Prof.-Pirlet-Str. 1, D-52074 Aachen, Germany
Phone: 049-241-80-7004  Fax: 049-241-8888-288
http://www.rwth-aachen.de/iac/Ww/group/landrum/root.html