Elemental version 0.79 released

[Jack Poulson]

Dear all,

I'm pleased to announce the release of a new version of Elemental, version 0.79. The changes from version 0.78, which was released about a month ago, are as follows:

Features
========
- Added Businger/Golub pivoted QR and the ability to early-exit (qr::BusingerGolub)
- Added thresholded SVD based upon the cross-product algorithm (svd::Thresholded)
- Added RRQR preprocessing for faster SingularValueSoftThresholding (SVT)
- Updated RPCA example to allow for use of RRQR-preprocessed SVT
- Added implementation of Cannon's algorithm (gemm::Cannon_NN)
- Added Kahan, GKS, and Extended Kahan matrices
- Added HermitianSign and UnitaryCoherence calculations
- Added sequential version of HermitianEig
- Added versions of a few routines (e.g., Gemm) which handle zero initialization
- Added a MemSwap function to complement MemCopy and MemZero

Bug fixes
=========
- Fixed several zero initialization bugs
- Fixed shared library linking for PMRRR on Macs
- Fixed syntax error in DistMatrix driver

Maintenance
===========
- Beginning to maintain REFERENCES and PUBLICATIONS files
- Switched to much simpler RAII-based call-stack manipulation
- Added BASE(F) macro to avoid repeatedly using 'typename Base<F>::type'
- Removed Parallel Linear Congruential Generator in favor of simpler scheme
- All special matrix function routines now take the output matrix as first argument
- Began removing 'internal' namespaces in favor of routine-specific namespaces
- Renamed 'HouseholderSolve' to 'LeastSquares'

As always, please let me know if you have any comments, concerns, or would like to contribute code.

Jack

P.S. I noticed today that the download count for the 0.78-p1 tarball over the past month (455) is substantially higher than previous releases (about 15 downloads a day). I unfortunately do not have any statistics on the usage of the Mercurial or Github repository.