Efficient implementation of covariance updates

How do I implement the following efficiently?

[X \in R^{N \times p}, y \in R^N, w \in R^{p}, p \gg N ]

[f(X, y,w) = \sum_{k:|\beta_k | greater 0 }} (x_j, x_k) w_k = (\tilde{X}[:,j], \tilde{X}) {\tilde w ]

for i in n_iterations
    for j in p
        f(X,y,w)
    end
end

background:

• w starts out dense but gets sparser as i -> n_iterations

• if w[j]==0 it will stay zero

• [(\tilde{X}[:,j], \tilde{X}) ] is recalculated for each iteration of the outer loop, but it can't be cached from the beginning since p x p is to large fit in memory.

• implementation will be in Cython

• cblas ddot could be used for the scalar product