Writing Scientific Software: A Guide to Good Style

by Suely Oliveira , David E. Stewart

• ISBN13: 9780521858960
• ISBN10: 0521858968
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-09-25
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The core of scientific computing is designing, writing, testing, debugging and modifying numerical software for application to a vast range of areas: from graphics, meteorology and chemistry to engineering, biology and finance. Scientists, engineers and computer scientists need to write good code, for speed, clarity, flexibility and ease of re-use. Oliveira and Stewart's style guide for numerical software points out good practices to follow, and pitfalls to avoid. By following their advice, readers will learn how to write efficient software, and how to test it for bugs, accuracy, and performance. Techniques are explained with a variety of programming languages, and illustrated with two extensive design examples, one in Fortran 90 and one in C++: other examples in C, C++, Fortran 90 and Java are scattered throughout the book. This manual of scientific computing style will be an essential addition to the bookshelf and lab of everyone who writes numerical software.

Table of Contents

Part I. Numerical Software: 1. Why numerical software?

2. Scientific computation and numerical analysis

3. Priorities

4. Famous disasters

5. Exercises

Part II. Developing Software: 6. Basics of computer organization

7. Software design

8. Modularity and all that

9. Data structures

10. Design for testing and debugging

11. Exercises

Part III. Efficiency in Time, Efficiency in Memory: 12. Be algorithm aware

13. Computer architecture and efficiency

14. Global vs. local optimization

15. Grabbing memory when you need it

16. Memory bugs and leaks

Part IV. Tools: 17. Sources of scientific software

18. Unix tools

19. Cubic spline function library

20. Multigrid algorithms

A. Review of vectors and matrices

B. Trademarks

Bibliography

Index.