RandBLAS will be a C++ library for sketching in randomized linear algebra. It is currently in a pre-alpha stage of development.

The eventual goal of RandBLAS is to provide a standard library that supports randomized linear algebra algorithms in other libraries. Our ideal outcome is that RandBLAS will eventually become a standard like the BLAS, in that hardware vendors might release their own optimized implementations of algorithms which confirm to the RandBLAS API. Achieving this goal will involve many community-wide conversations about RandBLAS' scope and its API.

This library will surely undergo several major revisions before its API stabilizes. Therefore we insist that no one use RandBLAS as a dependency in a larger project for now. While RandBLAS is a dependency for a library called "RandLAPACK" which we are also developing, we are prepared to make major changes to RandLAPACK whenever a major change is made to RandBLAS.

Refer to INSTALL.md for directions on how to install RandBLAS' dependencies, install RandBLAS itself, and use RandBLAS in other projects.

We'll need to conduct experiments for proofs-of-concept and benchmarking while developing RandBLAS. Those experiments should be kept under version control. If you want to make such an experiment, create a branch like

git checkout -b experiments/riley-sjltidea-220311

The branch name should always have the prefix "experiments/[your name]". The example name above includes keywords on the nature of the branch and date in YYMMDD format. If you want to share that example with others then you can push the branch to the BallisticLA/RandBLAS repository.

Using branches is important because the RandBLAS API is nowhere near settled; an example or benchmark written to work for the state of main today might break badly on the state of main tomorrow. If you get to the point of a clean example which you would like to refer to in the past, we recommend that you use git tags for important commits on your experiment branch.