[SciPy-dev] dae solvers

[Rob Clewley]

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 8:18 AM, Benny Malengier
<benny.malengier at gmail.com> wrote:

> Guess I should have googled a bit longer.

Well, maybe a bit longer still :) There have been a couple of other
attempts, too. For instance, you might get some joy from the wrapped
version of Radau, which has a lighter interface and is part of a more
python-oriented environment.

> As this pysundials is there, I do think it should be integrated somehow in
> scipy. What use of ode class and odepack in scipy which interface old
> vode/lsode fortran progs when pysundials exists that interfaces sundials and
> like that the new cvode and ida solvers?
> So perhaps ode.py should obtain a backend to that?  Or should scipy just no
> longer offer ode solvers...

There has been some discussion about ode solvers in scipy recently,
but it didn't come to much. People are still busy arguing over how to
represent matrices properly, let alone getting in to how dynamical
systems should be supported. Someone tried starting a new interface to
the existing ode solvers in scipy recently, but I don't know how
that's getting along. I think it's called pyode and on google code.

> Well, I'm not a scipy dev, just my 2 cents. It always amazes me how many
> duplication is going on. I'll investigate my options furter and make up my
> mind next week on how to proceed.

I mostly agree, but it's tricky to talk about duplication. Users in
different fields want different things from their packages, and have
different expectations about how many dependencies they're willing to
tolerate, how much of a GUI is supported, what kinds of application or
data formats are supported, etc. So there end up being some conscious
attempts to do similar things somewhat differently. And so that's not
necessarily a bad thing.

-Rob