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10.3: Goals and Background of the FFTW Project

  • Page ID
    2023
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    The FFTW project, begun in 1997 as a side project of the authors Frigo and Johnson as graduate students at MIT, has gone through several major revisions, and as of 2008 consists of more than 40,000 lines of code. It is difficult to measure the popularity of a free-software package, but (as of 2008) FFTW has been cited in over 500 academic papers, is used in hundreds of shipping free and proprietary software packages, and the authors have received over 10,000 emails from users of the software. Most of this chapter focuses on performance of FFT implementations, but FFTW would probably not be where it is today if that were the only consideration in its design. One of the key factors in FFTW's success seems to have been its flexibility in addition to its performance. In fact, FFTW is probably the most flexible DFT library available:

    • FFTW is written in portable C and runs well on many architectures and operating systems.
    • FFTW computes DFTs in O(nlogn)O(nlogn)" role="presentation" style="position:relative;" tabindex="0">


    This page titled 10.3: Goals and Background of the FFTW Project is shared under a CC BY license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by C. Sidney Burrus.

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