# All Questions

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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 ...
41k views

### 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 ...
3k views

### 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,...
2k views

### 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/...
7k views

### 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 ...
892 views

### 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 ...
1k views

### How to reorder variables to produce a banded matrix of minimum bandwidth?

I'm trying to solve a 2D Poisson equation by finite differences. In the process, I obtain a sparse matrix with only $5$ variables in each equation. For example, if the variables were $U$, then the ...
1k views

### 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 ...
10k views

### 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 ...
344 views

### What programming strategies can I take for easily modifying algorithm parameters?

Developing scientific algorithms is a highly iterative process often involving changing lots of parameters that I will want to vary either as part of my experimental design or as part of tweaking ...
3k views

### C++ Best practices for dealing with many constants, variables in scientific codes

I am developing a code to simulate fluid flow with biological substances present in the flow. This involves the standard Navier-Stokes equations coupled to some additional biological models. There are ...
2k views

### Parsing protein structure data in C

My background is in genomics, but I have recently been working with problems related to protein structure. I wrote a few relevant programs in C, building my own PDB file parser from scratch in the ...
2k views

### Finding a global minimum of a smooth, bounded, non-convex 2D function that is costly to evaluate

I have a bounded non-convex 2-D function which I'd like to find the minimum of. The function is quite smooth. Evaluating it is costly. An acceptable error is about 3% of the function's domain in each ...
988 views

### Scripted Mesh Generation Software

I'm looking for a mesh generation software that is free and open source, provides a sane scripting interface for domain specification, works for complex geometries, can generate 2D and 3D meshes, ...
4k views

### Disadvantages of common discretization schemes for CFD simulations

The other day, my computational fluid dynamics instructor was absent and he sent in his PhD candidate to substitute for him. In the lecture he gave, he seemed to indicate several disadvantages ...
8k views

### Null-space of a rectangular dense matrix

Given a dense matrix $$A \in R^{m \times n}, m >> n; max(m) \approx 100000$$ what is the best way to find its null-space basis within some tolerance $\epsilon$? Based on that basis can I then ...
331 views

### Desktop software with HPC resources for back end number crunching

Our workgroup produces a desktop application that simulates building energy performance. It is a .NET application and when the user is running a lot of simulations, they can be quite time consuming. ...
3k views

### Selecting most scattered points from a set of points

Is there any (efficient) algorithm to select subset of $M$ points from a set of $N$ points ($M < N$) such that they "cover" most area (over all possible subsets of size $M$)? I assume the points ...
371 views

### Databases of results for numerical codes

In the numerical methods literature, many research papers consist of a description of a new algorithmic variation, followed by a few test problems comparing the new method with one or two existing ...
1k views

### Which libraries have good high-level support for multigrid?

I'm planning to use multigrid to calulate some eigenvalues and vectors, and I noticed PETSc has high-level support for multigrid. The PETSc documentation says that this part of PETSc should not be ...
805 views

### Strategies for unit testing and test-driven development

I'm a huge advocate of test-driven development in scientific computing. It's utility in practice is just staggering, and really alleviates the classic troubles that code developers know. However, ...
66k views

### How to determine the amount of FLOPs my computer is capable of

I would like to determine the theoretical number of FLOPs (Floating Point Operations) that my computer can do. Can someone please help me with this. (I would like to compare my computer to some ...
4k views

### Problems where Conjugate gradient works much better than GMRES

I am interested in cases where Conjugate gradient works much better than GMRES method. In general, CG is preferable choice in many cases of SPD (symmetric-positive-definite) because it requires less ...
5k views

### Portable multicore/NUMA memory allocation/initialization best practices

When memory bandwidth limited computations are performed in shared memory environments (e.g. threaded via OpenMP, Pthreads, or TBB), there is a dilemma of how to ensure that the memory is correctly ...
3k views

### Is there a good, easy-to-use, high quality open source CFD solver out there?

My thesis is on developing numerical methods for model reduction in combustion. I run my methods purely on the chemistry part of combustion simulations, and I have plenty of case studies for 0-D ...
4k views

### Alternatives to hdf5

I've been using HDF5 for years, but as the size of the dataset grows I'm starting to experience the same problems listed here http://cyrille.rossant.net/moving-away-hdf5/ Can you point me to a ...
3k views

### Should I rent computing resources, or buy my own computers

Since this question is related to computation, I decided to post here. Hopefully it will be seen as appropriate. I've just started running atmospheric and oceanic models, and I realize that I need ...
2k views

### Example of a continuous function that is difficult to approximate with polynomials

For teaching purposes I'd need a continuous function of a single variable that is "difficult" to approximate with polynomials, i.e. one would need very high powers in a power series to "fit" this ...
2k views

### BDF vs implicit Runge Kutta time stepping

Are there any reasons for why one should choose high order implicit Runge Kutta (IMRK) over BDF time stepping? BDF seems much easier to me as $q$ stage IMRK needs $q$ linear solves per time step. ...
5k views

### uniform vs. non-uniform grid

It is probably a student level question but I can't exactly make it cleat to myself. Why is it more accurate to use non-uniform grids in the numerical methods? I am thinking in the context of some ...
6k views

### Row major versus Column major layout of matrices

In programming dense matrix computations, is there any reason to choose a row-major layout of the over the column-major layout? I know that depending on the layout of the matrix chosen, we need to ...
3k views

### What is the advantage of multigrid over domain decomposition preconditioners, and vice versa?

This is mostly aimed for elliptic PDEs over convex domains, so that I can get a good overview of the two methods.
1k views

### Does Computational Science involve programming?

I read about computational science on Wikipedia, but my understanding is not very clear. Does computational science involve programming? How different is computational science from computational ...
2k views

### (how to) write simulations that run faster?

I have started using python as the programming language for doing all my assignments in CFD. I have a very little experience in programming. I am from mechanical engineering background and am pursuing ...
2k views

### Why can't Householder reflections diagonalize a matrix?

When computing the QR factorization in practice, one uses Householder reflections to zero out the lower portion of a matrix. I know that for computing eigenvalues of symmetric matrices, the best you ...
6k views

### What are differences between 'a priori' and 'posteriori' error estimate in numerical analysis?

I have learnt about Finite Element Method (also a little on other numerical methods) but I don't know what are exactly definition of these two errors and differences between them?
5k views

### Finding which triangles points are in

Suppose I have a 2D mesh consisting of nonoverlapping triangles $\{T_k\}_{k=1}^N$, and a set of points $\{p_i\}_{i=1}^M \subset \cup_{k=1}^N T_K$. What is the best way to determine which triangle each ...
1k views

### Practical example of why it is not good to invert a matrix

I am aware about that inverting a matrix to solve a linear system is not a good idea, since it is not as accurate and as efficient as directly solving the system or using LU, Cholesky or QR ...
8k views

### Profiling CFD code with Callgrind

I'm using Valgrind + Callgrind to profile a solver I have written. As the Valgrind user manual states, I've compiled my code with the debugging options for the compiler: "Without debugging info, ...
516 views

### Are there operator splitting approaches for multiphysics PDEs that achieve high order convergence?

Given an evolution PDE $$u_t = Au + Bu$$ where $A,B$ are (possibly nonlinear) differential operators that don't commute, a common numerical approach is to alternate between solving $$u_t = Au$$ ...
20k views