[Haskell-cafe] Numerical Analysis

[Don Stewart]

pierreetienne.meunier:
> Hello Cafe,
> 
> Being a complete beginner in the field of numerical analysis, but
> anyway needing it to solve "real problems", I wrote a few functions
> recently to solve systems of polynomial equations using the "projected
> polyhedron" method by Maekawa and Patrikakalis.  This requires solving
> systems of linear equations precisely, thus the simple Gauss method
> was not enough, and I had to write also an algorithm for the "SVD
> decomposition".
  
> - The current Array library is definitely not adapted to production
> code. It makes debugging tricky, requires a heavy use of Debug.Trace
> to actually see what happens, and does not seem as fast as one could
> expect.

[snip]
 
> - A numerical analysis library should really take advantage of the
> parallelism in GHC, especially with the arrival of hardware such as
> fermi (anyway, I do not know how much haskell is compilable to fermi
> code). The love for loops and side-effects among this community is
> hard to understand, but that's more of a cultural problem.

Perhaps you can look at the new array packages of the last few years:

    * vector

        An efficient implementation of Int-indexed arrays (both mutable and
        immutable), with a powerful loop fusion optimization framework .
        
        http://hackage.haskell.org/package/vector

    * Repa

        High performance, regular, shape polymorphic parallel arrays.

        http://hackage.haskell.org/package/repa

-- Don