[SciPy-Dev] RFC: comments to BLAS committee from numpy/scipy devs

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 12:53 PM, Tyler Reddy <tyler.je.reddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> One common issue in computational geometry is the need to operate rapidly on
> arrays with "heterogeneous shapes."
>
> So, an array that has rows with different numbers of columns -- shape (1,3)
> for the first polygon and shape (1, 12) for the second polygon and so on.
>
> This seems like a particularly nasty scenario when the loss of "homogeneity"
> in shape precludes traditional vectorization -- I think numpy effectively
> converts these to dtype=object, etc. I don't
> think is necessarily a BLAS issue since wrapping comp. geo. libraries does
> happen in a subset of cases to handle this, but if there's overlap in
> utility you could pass it along I suppose.

You might be interested in this discussion of "Batch BLAS":
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DY4ImZT1coqri2382GusXgBTTTVdBDvtD5I14QHp9OE/edit#heading=h.pvsif1mxvaqq

I didn't get into it in the draft response, because it didn't seem
like something where NumPy/SciPy have any useful experience to offer,
but it sounds like there are people worrying about this case.

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org