From 937ac03c5de83a267db8b99d717b0d014e477cc0 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Riley Murray Date: Wed, 5 Jun 2024 18:22:06 -0400 Subject: [PATCH] release notes --- rtd/source/updates/index.rst | 71 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-- 1 file changed, 68 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/rtd/source/updates/index.rst b/rtd/source/updates/index.rst index d1808b2a..d8a4667a 100644 --- a/rtd/source/updates/index.rst +++ b/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 `_. + + +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 `_ for RandBLAS as a whole, + `another `_ for our sparse matrix functionality, + and `a third `_ 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 `_. + +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.