<p dir="auto">Rather than rolling our own sparse-matrix library, it seems like it would be much better to use <a href="http://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/" rel="nofollow">PETSc</a>, which is the de-facto standard here.</p>
<p dir="auto">PETSc would give us access to a huge number of sparse-direct back-ends (<a class="issue-link js-issue-link" data-error-text="Failed to load title" data-id="12254930" data-permission-text="Title is private" data-url="https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/2632" data-hovercard-type="issue" data-hovercard-url="/JuliaLang/julia/issues/2632/hovercard" href="https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/2632">#2632</a>), iterative solvers, sparse eigensolvers (<a class="issue-link js-issue-link" data-error-text="Failed to load title" data-id="8495314" data-permission-text="Title is private" data-url="https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/1573" data-hovercard-type="issue" data-hovercard-url="/JuliaLang/julia/issues/1573/hovercard" href="https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/1573">#1573</a>) via the <a href="http://www.grycap.upv.es/slepc/" rel="nofollow">SLEPc</a> library, optimized implementations (<a class="issue-link js-issue-link" data-error-text="Failed to load title" data-id="5121136" data-permission-text="Title is private" data-url="https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/942" data-hovercard-type="issue" data-hovercard-url="/JuliaLang/julia/issues/942/hovercard" href="https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/942">#942</a>), multiple output formats, and parallel support (currently completely missing and quite nontrivial to implement well).</p>
<p dir="auto">Re-inventing the wheel here is a little like rewriting LAPACK.</p>
<p dir="auto">I'm having a problem where when I build from <a class="commit-link" data-hovercard-type="commit" data-hovercard-url="https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/commit/3c7136e3697865cc1381b17199cb1a92a519f437/hovercard" href="https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/commit/3c7136e3697865cc1381b17199cb1a92a519f437"><tt>3c7136e</tt></a> when I run julia, I get the error <code class="notranslate">could not allocate pools</code> If I run as a different user, Julia runs successfully.</p>
<p dir="auto">I think there might be something specific to my user on this box, but I am happy to help identify what is happening here.</p>
<p dir="auto">I think this is related to <a class="issue-link js-issue-link" data-error-text="Failed to load title" data-id="45978605" data-permission-text="Title is private" data-url="https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/8699" data-hovercard-type="pull_request" data-hovercard-url="/JuliaLang/julia/pull/8699/hovercard" href="https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/8699">#8699</a></p>
<p dir="auto">also, from the julia-users group: <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/julia-users/FSIC1E6aaXk" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/julia-users/FSIC1E6aaXk</a></p>