First Goals and next steps

Hello!

I have not written a post for a while because I have had some health issues.

During the first two weeks of GSoC I have worked on Autotools and I have compiled Octave with link to SUNDIALS. The first step for doing this was to check the presence and usability of ida.h in configure.ac, so I used the macro OCTAVE_CHECK_LIB which also sets the flags CPPFLAGS, LDFLAGS and LIBS. Then I set the right configuration variables in the build-aux folder and modified build-env namespace. Finally I wrote a dld-function which includes ida.h and calls the function IDACreate from SUNDIALS which returns a pointer to the IDA memory structure.
This dld-function generates an oct-file which can be executed from Octave.

All these changes are visible in my public repository on Bitbucket:
https://bitbucket.org/Francesco_Faccio/octave

In the next few days I will further investigate the recursive dependencies of SUNDIALS and their license and set up the correct build flags for such dependencies, I will write more tests in configure.ac in order to check the availability of functions and headers of the library.

After discussing with mentors we decided to start the implementation of ode15i because it's more close to IDA and more general than ode15s. Once ode15i will be written, ode15s will be built around it.

We have also decided which are the next steps before midterm evaluation:

• implement a minimal .oct wrapper for IDA in Octave with a primitive interface such as $[t , y] = ode15i (odefun, tspan, y0, yp0, Jacobian)$
  that invokes IDA with all options set to default values


• use two benchmark problems to test the correctness and speed of the code:
  I will compare it with the C implementation of SUNDIALS and with the m-file implementation relying on the mex interface of SUNDIALS 

As benchmark problems we have chosen two examples which deal with dense and sparse methods.

The first one regards Robertson chemical kinetics problem, in which differential equations are given for species $y_{1}$ and $y_{2}$ while an algebraic equation determines $y_{3}$. The equations for the species concentrations $y_{i}(t)$ are:

\begin{eqnarray*} \begin{cases} y_{1}^{'} = -0.04y_{1} + 10^{4}y_{2}y_{3} \\ y_{2}^{'} = 0.04y_{1} - 10^{4}y_{2}y_{3} - 3\cdot 10^{7}y_{2}^{2} \\ 0 = y_{1} + y_{2} + y_{3} - 1 \end{cases} \end{eqnarray*}

The initial values are taken as $y_{1} = 1$, $y_{2} = 0$ and $y_{3} = 0$. This example computes the three concentration components on the interval from $t = 0$ through $t = 4\cdot 10^{10}$.

This is the plot of the solution (the value of $y_{2}$ is multiplied by a factor of $10^{4}$).

Dense methods of IDA are applied for solving this problem.


The second problem is a $2D$ heat equation, semidiscretized to a DAE. The DAE system arises from the Dirichlet boundary condition $u = 0$, along with the differential equations arising from the discretization of the interior of the region.
The domain is the unit square $\Omega = \{0 \leq x, y \geq 1\}$ and the equations solved are: