release notes

rtd/source/updates/index.rst

@@ -2,6 +2,71 @@
 Changes to RandBLAS
 ===================
 
-Definitely : make a “Changes to RandBLAS” part of the web docs.
-Mention that we’re doing semantic versioning.
-Mention that we have a tentative policy of acting on requests for bug fixes for any RandBLAS release (no matter how old). 
+This page details changes made to RandBLAS over time, in reverse chronological order.
+We have a tentative policy of providing bugfix support for any release of 
+RandBLAS upon request, no matter how old. With any luck, RandBLAS will grow enough
+in the future that we will change this policy to support a handful of versions
+at a time.
+
+RandBLAS follows `Semantic Versioning <semver.org>`_.
+
+
+RandBLAS 0.2
+------------
+
+*Released June 5, 2024.*
+
+Today marks the first formal release of RandBLAS. We've been working on it for over three years, so 
+we couldn't possibly describe all of its capabilities in just this changelog. Instead, we'll repurpose some
+text that's featured prominently in our documentation at the time of this release.
+
+A quote from the README, describing the aims of this project:
+
+    RandBLAS supports high-level randomized linear algebra algorithms (like randomized low-rank SVD) that might be implemented in other libraries.
+    Our goal is for RandBLAS to become a standard like the BLAS, in that hardware vendors might release their own optimized implementations of algorithms which confirm to the RandBLAS API.
+
+A quote from the website, describing our current capabilities:
+
+    RandBLAS is efficient, flexible, and reliable.
+    It uses CPU-based OpenMP acceleration to apply its sketching operators to dense or sparse data matrices stored in main memory.
+    All sketches produced by RandBLAS are dense.
+    As such, dense data matrices can be sketched with dense or sparse operators, while sparse data matrices can only be sketched with dense operators.
+    RandBLAS can be used in distributed environments through its ability to (reproducibly) compute products with *submatrices* of sketching operators.
+
+There's a *ton* of documentation besides those snippets. In fact, we have three separate categories of documentation!
+
+ 1. Traditional source code comments.
+ 2. Web documentation (i.e., this entire website)
+ 3. Developer notes; `one <https://github.com/BallisticLA/RandBLAS/blob/a66751ced6a0b44667e21bc4cb6fe59b5785c7fb/RandBLAS/DevNotes.md>`_ for RandBLAS as a whole,
+    `another <https://github.com/BallisticLA/RandBLAS/blob/a66751ced6a0b44667e21bc4cb6fe59b5785c7fb/RandBLAS/sparse_data/DevNotes.md>`_ for our sparse matrix functionality,
+    and `a third <https://github.com/BallisticLA/RandBLAS/blob/a66751ced6a0b44667e21bc4cb6fe59b5785c7fb/rtd/DevNotes.md>`_ for this website.
+
+Contributors and Acknowledgements
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+Since this is our first release, many acknowledgements in order.
+We'll start with contributors to the RandBLAS codebase as indicated by the 
+repository commit history.
+
+    Riley Murray, Burlen Loring, Kaiwen He, Maksim Melnichenko, Tianyu Liang, and Vivek Bharadwaj.
+
+In addition to code contributors, we had the benefit of supervision and input
+from the following established principal investigators
+
+    James Demmel, Michael Mahoney, Jack Dongarra, Piotr Luszczek, Mark Gates, and Julien Langou.
+
+We would also like to thank Weslley da Silva Pereira, who gave valuable feedback at
+the earliest stages of this project, and all of the individuals who gave feedback on 
+our `RandNLA monograph <https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.11474>`_. 
+
+The work that lead to this release of RandBLAS was funded by the
+U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, and was
+conducted at the International Computer Science Institute,
+the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, 
+Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories. 
+
+What happened to RandBLAS 0.1?
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+We tagged a commit on the RandBLAS repository with version 0.1.0 almost two years ago.
+However, we hadn't maintained version numbers or a dedicated changelog since then. RandBLAS 0.2.0 is
+our *first* formal release. We opted not to release under version 0.1.0 since that could
+ambiguously refer to anything from the now-very-old 0.1.0 tag up to the present.