Re: ode15s project for GSOC 2016

[Carlo De Falco]

On 22 Mar 2016, at 16:11, Carlo de Falco <address@hidden> wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> I have seen quite a few students introducing themselves on the mailing list
> and declaring their interest in the project on ode15s, yet none of you has 
> started
> filling in their proposal on the GSOC website.
> 
> The deadline for the application submission is March 25, therefore I urge you 
> all
> to start filling in the draft proposal ASAP if you wish to receive feedback 
> before
> the deadline.
> 
> In particular I am really interested in seing the timeline you expect to 
> follow in
> implementing the project and the tests you expect to use to verify the 
> correctness
> of the implementation.
> 
> Good luck with your application,
> c.

Dear all,

As Nir recently posted to the list, we got 20 applications for Octave GSoC, 
3 of which propose to work on the ode15s project.

The student evaluation period ends April 11, so in order to do the evaluation
I'd like to ask all students interested in this project to complete a couple of
small exercises.

1) Prepare (and post to the tracker) a changeset for the development branch in 
Octave that adds
a demo to ode45 and ode23 that estimates a posteriori the order of the methods
and produces a convergence plot. As a benchmark test use something as simple as 
  
y' = y(t)   0<t<1; y(0) = 1.

2) ode23 and ode45 as of the version currently in the development branch of 
Octave contain
a significant amount of duplicate code that performs the initial check of 
options provided
by the user setting the needed defaults to options and flags that have not been 
set.
Prepare (and post to the tracker) a changeset that moves this code into a 
common private function that 
is invoked at the beginning of each solver. This private function could look 
something like
opts = set_default_options (user_options, default_values)
but any alternative design you can come up with is OK if you can justify your 
choices.

Notice that ode23 and ode45 are only present in the development version of 
Octave so to perform 
this tasks you will also need to 

- clone the Octave mercurial repo
- build Octave from source

Enjoy coding!
c.