[poulson]

The research behind ScaLAPACK was very worthwhile and led to a huge number of algorithms and insights, and it took me several years of earnest weekend/late-night work to get Elemental to its current state (often drawing from the previous work on ScaLAPACK and PLAPACK). I have referenced a large number of their publications in my source code.

With that said, if you were familiar with the source code and APIs of both libraries, I think that you would see a clear benefit. This is supported by the way that Elemental is growing and arguably has more functionality than ScaLAPACK (with the notable exception being a parallel Schur decomposition). Over the past couple of years, the library has primarily been developed to support my research goals, but a large number of research groups are actively using it now.