Re: Regarding GSOC project in Octave

[Kai Torben Ohlhus]

On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 10:29 PM, Anurag Sharma <address@hidden> wrote:

Dear Kai

I got your email id from wiki on gsoc and Nir directed me to you regarding the project which you did last summer in gsoc -  Incomplete sparse factorizations ichol, ilu 

I wished to know few things regarding the project:

1. What are the skill set required to contribute to the project. Both in terms of programming know how and the mathematical background (though I hope being an advanced undergrad in math I wont have much trouble regarding the latter)

2. I am more worried of programming background. My technical know how limits to c/c++ and some python. I have also written some scripts in matlab for assignments but  nothing more than that. Also till now I haven't contributed to any big project like octave. So coding practices like modularizing etc are somewhat new to me. Though I have programmed a lot in c/c++ but mostly it has been short programs for algorithmic competitions(I represented my College in ICPC regionals).

3. What books/online tutorials apart from the ones mentioned in the page did you follow for your gsoc project?

4. Are you gonna mentor the project this time? 

Regards

Anurag Sharma

Dear Anurag,

thank you for your interest in GNU/Octave development. I'm sorry for the late answer. Please try to keep the public mailing list in the recipients, so maybe others can answer your questions too. Regarding your questions:

1. As to my knowledge there aren't that much free preconditioning libraries available, that fully correspondent to the features MATLAB offers, I think a mathematical understanding of the algorithms themselves is required and you should be able to figure out what features are missing in available libraries, in order to maybe implement them yourself. One example: ITSOL [1] (the preconditioning library I used last year) doesn't offer the modified ILU versions and so far I was not able to implement them.

2. You should have a solid background in C/C++, as many parts you are working on this project are entirely in these programming language (ITSOL is a C library for example). But you don't need to be a C++ guru.

3. You can have a look at ITSOL [1], as its features are very close to that one of MATLABs ILU implementation [2]. And I read many papers on that subject [3], but not all were worth reading them. Maybe you start some research on that topic for a good, free ICHOL implementation. 

4. I will support anyone working on this project.

[1] http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~saad/software/ITSOL/

[2] http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/ilu.html

[3] http://siko1056-gsoc.blogspot.de/2013/08/little-update.html

Best,

Kai