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The Tensor Algebra Compiler

tensor-compiler.org

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Re: The Tensor Algebra Compiler

#2
Hi Hacker News! I’m one of the developers. This project was also featured in MIT News yesterday:

http://news.mit.edu/2017/faster-big-data-analysis-tensor-alg...

The code is available at:

https://github.com/tensor-compiler/taco/issues

I’m happy to discuss the project and to answer any questions :)

Re: The Tensor Algebra Compiler

#4

Hi Hacker News! I’m one of the developers. This project was also featured in MIT News yesterday: http://news.mit.edu/2017/faster-big-data-analysis-tensor-alg... The code is available at: https://github.com/tensor-compiler/taco/issues I’m happy to discuss the project and to answer any questions :)

Any chance you'd be interested in adding more direct support for nonlinear systems? That seems to be missing from most computation graph compiler libraries, e.g. Tensorflow.

Re: The Tensor Algebra Compiler

#5

Hi Hacker News! I’m one of the developers. This project was also featured in MIT News yesterday: http://news.mit.edu/2017/faster-big-data-analysis-tensor-alg... The code is available at: https://github.com/tensor-compiler/taco/issues I’m happy to discuss the project and to answer any questions :)

The MIT story focuses on "big data," but it looks like this might be applicable to coupled-cluster calculations in physics/chemistry too. Is it? Can you compare/contrast with e.g. the Cyclops Tensor Framework (http://solomon2.web.engr.illinois.edu/ctf/) or NWChem's Tensor Contraction Engine (http://www.csc.lsu.edu/~gb/TCE/)?

Re: The Tensor Algebra Compiler

#6

Hi Hacker News! I’m one of the developers. This project was also featured in MIT News yesterday: http://news.mit.edu/2017/faster-big-data-analysis-tensor-alg... The code is available at: https://github.com/tensor-compiler/taco/issues I’m happy to discuss the project and to answer any questions :)

The MIT story focuses on "big data," but it looks like this might be applicable to coupled-cluster calculations in physics/chemistry too. Is it? Can you compare/contrast with e.g. the Cyclops Tensor Framework ( http://solomon2.web.engr.illinois.edu/ctf/ ) or NWChem's Tensor Contraction Engine ( http://www.csc.lsu.edu/~gb/TCE/ )?

Larry chose to focus on the big data part, because it is intuitive. But I think you're absolutely correct, that it has applications in physics/chemistry (and machine learning too). We're actually talking to people in our theoretical physics department, who may want to use taco for their QCD computations. There's also a new issue on our tracker about adding complex number support for nuclear computations and quantum computing: https://github.com/tensor-compiler/taco/issues/116.

The tensor contraction engine is great work, and focuses on dense tensor. We currently optimize for sparse tensors so TCE will do better than us for pure dense expressions. We want to bridge this gap next semester though.

The cyclops framework is also great. We discuss it in our related work, but we did not directly compare to it in our evaluation. The first version of it, like TCE, focused on dense tensors, and their main focus is on distributed computing, which we don't support yet (we do shared memory parallel execution at the moment). They have some followup work on sparse computations. The difference to our work is that they, if I read their paper correctly, transposes the data until they can call pre-existing matrix multiplication routines. This causes data movement overheads. Our work compiles expressions to work at the data at hand, without moving it.

Re: The Tensor Algebra Compiler

#8
post #4

Hi Hacker News! I’m one of the developers. This project was also featured in MIT News yesterday: http://news.mit.edu/2017/faster-big-data-analysis-tensor-alg... The code is available at: https://github.com/tensor-compiler/taco/issues I’m happy to discuss the project and to answer any questions :)

Any chance you'd be interested in adding more direct support for nonlinear systems? That seems to be missing from most computation graph compiler libraries, e.g. Tensorflow.

Hi, that sounds very interesting and I hope someone works on it. We're only so many people though, and we have several things we want to do that will at least occupy us until next summer.

Re: The Tensor Algebra Compiler

#10
post #7

Is there a list of applications this may be especially geared toward? I’m a little out of practice and this seems interesting.

I don't know of an explicit list like this, but some areas that we are particularly interested in are: data analytics (tensor factorization), machine learning (anything sparse including perhaps sparse neural networks), and scientific computing/graphics (general relativity, quantum mechanics such as QCD, finite element simulations, and apparently nuclear physics). It is particularly suited anywhere you have sparse matrices or tensors.
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