# All Questions

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### Algorithms for (adaptive?) function plotting

I am looking for algorithms to draw standard 2d-graphs for functions that may or may not have singularities. The purpose is to write a "Mini-CAS", so I have no a priori knowledge of the types of ...
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### How to incorporate the boundary conditions with the Galerkin method?

I've been reading some resources on the web about Galerkin methods to solve PDEs, but I'm not clear about something. The following is my own account of what I have understood. Consider the following ...
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### Solving unconstrained nonlinear optimization problems on GPU

I am trying to solve some unconstrained nonlinear optimization problems on GPU (CUDA). The objective function is a smooth nonlinear function, and its gradient is relatively cheap to compute ...
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### Why are Octrees used for Multipole space decomposition?

In most (all?) implementations of the Fast Multipole Method (FMM), octrees are used to decompose the relevant domain. Theoretically, octrees provide a simple volumetric bound, which is useful for ...
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### Is there any open-source or easy-to-access software that can simplify algebraic expressions like $x^{2}+2x+3, x=\sqrt{2}t-1$?

I always calculate things by hand, but now my comrades are getting nasty and making a lot of repetitive exercises involving just plugging things in like the expression above. I am particularly ...
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### Python vs FORTRAN

Which one is better: FORTRAN or Python? And I guess that in both cases you need Gnuplot, am I right? I'm working on a Windows machine at the moment. I'd like to use it to get numerical solutions for ...
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### Why are higher-order Runge–Kutta methods not used more often?

I was just curious as to why high-order (i.e. greater than 4) Runge–Kutta methods are almost never discussed/employed (at least to my knowledge). I understand it requires greater computational time ...
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### State of the Mac OS in Scientific Computing and HPC

Back towards the dawn of OS X, there seemed to be a great deal of hubbub, at least in the Mac world (I was nowhere near scientific computing at the time) about the Mac OS as a platform for scientific ...
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### To what extent is generic and meta-programming using C++ templates useful in computational science?

The C++ language provides generic programming and metaprogramming through templates. These techniques have found their way into many large-scale scientific computing packages (e.g., MPQC, LAMMPS, CGAL,...
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### Binary vs. ASCII file size

I need to write some data from a computation, that will be read later by Paraview (.vtu or vtk file). When it comes to file size , should I go for the ASCII format or the Binary format ?
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### Log-log parallel scaling/efficiency plots

A lot of my own work revolves around making algorithms scale better, and one of the preferred ways of showing parallel scaling and/or parallel efficiency is to plot the performance of an algorithm/...
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### What is the best way to determine the number of non zeros in sparse matrix multiplication?

I was wondering whether there is a fast and efficient method to find the number of non zeros in advance for sparse matrix multiplication operation assuming both matrices are in CSC or CSR format. I ...
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### How to address numerical non-associativity for parallel reduction?

A parallel reduction assumes that the corresponding operation is associative. This assumption is violated for addition of floating point numbers. You might ask why I care about this. Well, it makes ...
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### Which version of Fortran should I learn?

I'm a Mechanical Engineering student interested in the field of aerospace engineering where, I'm told, Fortran is still commonly used. Which version of Fortran should I invest my time to learn?
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### Are BLAS implementations guaranteed to give the exact same result?

Given two different BLAS implementations, can we expect that they make the exact same floating point computations and return the same results? Or can it happen, for instance, that one computes a ...
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### Do currently available GPUs support double precision floating point arithmetic?

I have run the molecular dynamics (MD) code GROMACS on a Ubuntu Linux cluster consisting of nodes containing 24 Intel Xeon CPUs. My particular point of interest turns out to be somewhat sensitive to ...