Tensor multiplication library

Question

I am writing a scientific code in c which requires numerous tensor products, and higher-order tensor operations as well, e.g. contraction, kronecker product, etc. I am planning on implementing this myself using efficient algorithms as in the literature and employing a good BLAS library. I did some looking about and haven't really found anything for c (plenty for c++, python etc.). Am I missing something or has this really not been well implemented in c?

Thanks.

Answer 1

There are many different uses of tensors in scientific computing, so this question is hard to answer without more details.

There is a related answer on SciComp that mentions Eigen, Armadillo, deal.II, libtensor and libdynd.

If you are interested in contracting large tensors in parallel, look at the Cyclops Tensor Framework (CTF), which is the back-end for multiple quantum chemistry codes. If you want to do a large number of small contractions, CTF may not help you.

Other open-source tensor libraries include libtensor and TiledArray, which are also used in quantum chemistry.

The MADNESS project has a tensor class that might meet your needs if small dimensions are of interest.

itensor is another tensor library, which aims to support DMRG computations.

FTensor is a C++ tensor library oriented at general relativity.

Because tensors operations are important to machine learning, companies like Facebook and Google have released tensor libraries such as THPP and TensorFlow, respectively.

There is a very old project called POOMA that might support small tensors to meet your needs, but this project is no longer active and you should expect no support whatsoever.

When all else fails, see Wikipedia or Google (about half of the information here was identified by searching for "tensor library" on Google, although I have historical familiarity with most of it).