Talk:Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software/Archive 1

This article was deleted through the prod process recently. That deletion has been contested, and the article has been restored. Further attempts at deleting this article should be made through WP:AFD or WP:CSD if the article meets any speedy deletion criteria except the recreation of deleted material criterion.

Notability and cleanup

I'm the one who originally PRODded this. This article needs reliable sources to attest to its notability per WP:SOFTWARE (google count isn't enough), or it'll face deletion for real. Also, it needs to lose all the documentation content (see WP:NOT). Sandstein 15:01, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

OK. I'll take a crack at clean up and references. I am a little confused about how to deal with evidence of notability that doesn't really enhance the encyclopedic content (such as the link I just added show it being used as a performance benchmark against another product. Maybe the point is I should work that link in as a citation to a claim that ATLAS is often used as a starting point or performance reference for comparison with other libraries. -- Jake 18:46, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

I have made a pass at cleaning it up. Tried to remove a lot of the how-to content and cast it more in terms of how it works and what the issues are, which I think is an interesting, albeit technical, subject for the article. I'd like to remove the {howto} tag, but would like someone else to take a look first. I'm happy to address other specific or general concerns. -- Jake 19:11, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Thank you. I still feel that the excessive level of technical detail is in violation of WP:NOT as an indiscriminate collection of information; thoroughly inaccessible to any non-expert (to me, a layman, it looks like word salad); completely uncited and thus looking like original research (which is prohibited); and lacking any encyclopedic relevance that I can see. We are a general encyclopedia, not a technical manual. For this reason, I'd delete everything except the intro, i.e. the section "Approach" et seq.

Furthermore, I fail to see how one reference of this software being used in a performance comparison makes it notable under any criterion of (WP:SOFTWARE), which, in fairness, is not yet adopted as a guideline, but is widely accepted as a standard. The burden of proof of notability is not yet met, IMHO. Sandstein 19:39, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Unlike many others, I do believe that it is a great advantage of Wikipedia that anyone can work on any articles, regardless of their own expertise. However, if you work outside your area of expertise, you need to take extra care. Something you may find little information about might be significant in an area you know nothing about. But ATLAS is not even such a bordercase. It is huge in computer science, and a researcher in the field would hardly try to establish notability because it is blindingly obvious to them. The article did mention the fact that ATLAS is used by most of the well-known math software – I cannot imagine how this could possibly be construed as not notable. Besides, a short visit at Google Scholar will find you a ton of academic papers that were based on ATLAS. If you want to help out with articles that really need work or even deletion, I recommend doing New Pages patrol.

That said, I agree with Sandstein that the article needed a clean up. It is not the amount of technical detail – we have many excellent and very technical articles – WP is not the Britannica, we can go as deep as we care. But the installation how-to didn't really belong here (the "platform-specific errata" can go, too). The technical details need encyclopedic writing (i.e. context and actual explanations instead of a list of keywords), and some sources for the technical descriptions wouldn't hurt, either. JakeVortex, you certainly seem to have the knowledge. Do you think you could add all the context to get people not familiar with the subject up to speed? It's kinda like writing a technical paper, except instead of only citing the literature, you can also cite WP. You can assume your readership knows BLAS, because if they don't, the word is linked and it's that article's job to explain the concept. So you are fine for the words you linked (e.g. GEMM or optimization), but we need more context for others. For instance, for the section currently named "Optimization approach": what is blocking factor, or cache edge? What are ops? (or better replace it with the full word) From the initial descriptions, level 1 and level 2 BLAS appear to be identical (maybe link to the BLAS article again, because it should describe the levels). A sentence like "Since we have N^3 ops with only N^2 data, many opportunities for optimization" maybe obvious to you, but we should spell these things out for the benefit of our readers. And I'd rename the "Approach" section "Platform support" or some such and move it right above the External links section. Rl 21:40, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the input, Rl. I defer to your expert assessment, but while this software might be hugely notable among experts, this is just in no way apparent from the article, at least not to (I guess) roughly 99.999% of readers. The claim that it is "used by most of the well-known math software" is good, but it took me quite some time to realise that you mean Maple, MATLAB et al. And I wouldn't know where to begin to look for notability in Google Scholar papers, sorry. My point was just that the burden is on the authors of expert-interest articles to clearly state what's notable about their topic, with sources, otherwise they run into trouble with policy nerds like me. OK, I'll bugger off to NPP, then... Sandstein 22:20, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Thank for the feedback. I have made some more changes to the intro to set the context for the software that uses ATLAS, and have reworked the first section to direct it to a (more) general audience. More work to do.... Thanks for all the feedback. When you live and breath this stuff, it is sometime had to take a step back.  ;-> -- Jake 23:01, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

I was asked to have a look at this article. I don't understand all of the article, but here is my impression. The work that Jack has done in the last few days vastly improved the article, but it still needs some rigorous editing. I don't understand why the section "Need for installation" is in the article. The optimization approach is, as I understand it, what distinguishes ATLAS from other BLAS implementations, so this should be explained properly. The terms "level 1/2/3" should be explained to make the page more self-contained. Whether GEMM should copy is an example of the "multiple implementations" and I think it should be presented as such. I don't know what "cache edge" is. I'll have a crack at the article if I can find some time. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 04:00, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Jitse. I have made a couple more passes: moving the install section to the end (for now), brought in a review of the BLAS levels. Pulled in the level 1 and level 2 information about ATLAS into the section about optimization so they don't need their own sections. And some general fmt cleanup and wikification.

I don't understand why the section "Need for installation" is in the article. What I am trying to do with that is explain that one of issues with LAPACK (the high level library) is that you really want to have a fast BLAS implementation underneath it. This can be a problem especially when a new system comes available. One of the big values of ATLAS is it gives people (such as system vendors themselves as well as early adopters or scientists working on systems that aren't really marketed and perhaps well supported for science) a straightforward way to obtain a BLAS implementation optimized for that particular system. -- Jake 16:20, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

The article is clearly moving in a good direction. Thanks, Jake. I don't want to overwhelm you with my nitpicking – if you want to hear my take on possible improvements, please let me know. Rl 21:05, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Any improvements or suggestions welcome: be bold. I haven't edited much in the last year, so I see that cites and what-not are done differently these days. I figure I'll just keep nibbling away at this. -- Jake 00:09, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

I reworked the intro (also removing the external links – they don't seem very helpful to the reader and notability is established without them) and touched up the Functionality section. As for the cites, using <ref> is much better (easier to use and maintain) than some of the older systems, and the use of templates (such as {{cite web}}) is entirely optional. Rl 08:18, 7 October 2006 (UTC)