[SciPy-Dev] Consensus on the future of integrate.ode

[Juan Luis Cano]

On 09/09/2013 10:27 AM, Geoff Oxberry wrote:
> PETSc and scipy are trying to do different, but related things. PETSc 
> and petsc4py are trying to provide a software platform for developing 
> computational science applications that can run on anything from 
> desktops with a single processor to a Blue Gene/Q with tens or 
> hundreds of thousands of processors.
>
> SciPy is more geared towards rapid prototyping and computational 
> exploration on a single processor, so it helps to have a more 
> intuitive API, preferably something like MATLAB since that's so 
> prevalent in education, and a lot of people who use SciPy come from a 
> MATLAB background. Even though the licenses are compatible, I'm not 
> sure you'd want to incorporate elements of petsc4py into SciPy 
> (although it would be incredibly cool to be able to use any of their 
> extremely long list of ODE or DAE solvers).

I think this is a good point that has been made. Maybe we could aim for 
a less complex package that fits our (more modest) needs.

>     The non sundials solvers in odes are also not as state of the art
>     as some that are added in above two interfaces.
>     The problem with above packages is their license and the fact that
>     they are packages with parsing language, ..., see eg:
>     https://github.com/casadi/casadi/blob/master/examples/python/dae_single_shooting_in_30_lines.py
>     .
>

What if we just stay with your odes? It's still a big improvement, 
perhaps a good tradeoff between state of the art algorithms, simplicity 
and licensing compatibility.

>
>     Note that you can pass an array of times to sundials at which you
>     want output, and then all iteration is done inside sundials, so
>     the point of time step outside of sundials is not needed (though
>     in many problems you'll want to do stepping controlled in a python
>     loop).
>
>     Benny
>
>
>         Remark 2 Frontend.
>
>         We can define a new integrate.ode interface that wraps
>         scikits.odes. It seems that you already have some ideas in
>         that area, mentioning the MATLAB style. I looked at the MATLAB
>         docs just now and spend 20 minutes thinking how this might
>         look if it were more pythonic. You can take a look here, fork
>         your own version to make changes or add comments,
>
>         https://gist.github.com/danieljfarrell/6482713
>
>         Best wishes,
>
>         Dan
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>
>
>
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>
>
> -- 
> Geoffrey Oxberry, Ph.D., E.I.T.
>
>
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