Automated sparse matricies in Fortran

Question

I know that Intel Fortran has libraries with functions and subroutines for working with sparse matricies, but I'm wondering if there is also some sort of data type or automated method for creating the sparse matricies in the first place.

BACKGROUND: I have a program that uses some 3 & 4 dimensional arrays that can be very large in the first 2 dimensions (~10k to ~100k elements in each dimension, maybe more). In the first 2 dimensions, each array is mostly (95% or so) populated w/ zeroes. To make the program friendly to machines with a "normal" amount of RAM available, I'd like to convert to sparse matricies. The manner in which the current conventional arrays are handled & updated throughout the code is pretty dependent on the code application, so I'm looking for a way to convert to sparse matrix storage without significant modification to the code. Basically, I'm lazy, and I don't want to revise the entire memory management implementation or write an entire new module where my arrays live and are managed. Is there a library or something else for Fortran that would implement a data type or something so that I can use sparse matrix storage without re-engineering each array and how it is handled? Thanks for the help. Cheers.

Answer 1

There are many different sparse formats and many different libraries for handling sparse matrices in Fortran (e.g. sparskit, petsc, ...) However, none of them can offer that compact array handling formalism, which is available in Fortran for intrinsic dense arrays (especially the subarray notation). So, you'll have to touch your code at several places, when you want to change it to use sparse matrices.