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Libraries for Linear Algebra

Libraries for Linear Algebra#

NumPy Linear Algebra#

The NumPy library has a lot of linear algebra functions that work directly on NumPy arrays. It also uses the @ operator to define matrix multiplication. Let’s look at some of these.

import numpy as np

We can treat any two-dimensional array as a matrix.

A = np.array([[1, 2, 3],
              [5, 7, 11],
              [13, 17, 19]])
A

array([[ 1,  2,  3],
       [ 5,  7, 11],
       [13, 17, 19]])

Let’s multiply this matrix and a vector

x = np.array([1, 2, 3])
b = A @ x
b

array([ 14,  52, 104])

We can solve the system \({\bf A}{\bf x} = {\bf b}\) easily too:

x = np.linalg.solve(A, b)
x

array([1., 2., 3.])

We can also find the inverse:

A_inv = np.linalg.inv(A)
A @ A_inv

array([[ 1.00000000e+00, -5.55111512e-17, -2.77555756e-17],
       [ 2.77555756e-17,  1.00000000e+00,  8.32667268e-17],
       [-2.41473508e-15,  3.88578059e-16,  1.00000000e+00]])

We see that we get back nearly the identity matrix when we do \({\bf A}{\bf A}^{-1}\)

In fact, we can easily create an identity matrix:

I = np.eye(5)
I

array([[1., 0., 0., 0., 0.],
       [0., 1., 0., 0., 0.],
       [0., 0., 1., 0., 0.],
       [0., 0., 0., 1., 0.],
       [0., 0., 0., 0., 1.]])

BLAS, LINPACK, and LAPACK#

There are several standard linear algebra libraries that were originally implemented in Fortran and C.

BLAS#

The Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) is a low level library that provides routines for matrix-matrix and matrix-vector multiple, norms, etc.

Most other linear algebra libraries are built from BLAS.

Three levels of functionality:

  • Level 1: vector operations \((\alpha {\bf x} + {\bf y})\)

  • Level 2: matrix-vector operations \((\alpha {\bf A x} + \beta {\bf y})\) (usually called an [SD]AXPY operation)

  • Level 3: matrix-matrix operations \((\alpha {\bf A B} + \beta {\bf C})\)

Many chip vendors (Intel, NVIDIA, etc.) will provide custom BLAS libraries that are hand-optimized for their chips.

LINPACK#

LINPACK is an older library for linear algebra written in the 1970s in Fortran. It was designed for the computer architectures that dominated back then.

LAPACK#

LAPACK is a more modern linear algebra library, built on top of BLAS. It provides routines for solving linear systems, finding eigenvalues, … and has optimized versions of the methods for matrices with different symmetries and structures.

Even NumPy uses LAPACK under the hood—the numpy.linalg.solve page shows that it uses gesv, which is the LAPACK general matrix solver (that uses LU decomposition internally).

Some more modern C++ alternatives are listed here: https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/questions/26395/how-to-start-using-lapack-in-c

For example, the Armadillo library.

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