Randy Paffenroth
Applied and Computational Mathematics, 217-50
California Insitute of Technology
Pasadena, CA 91125
http://www.acm.caltech.edu/~redrod/
redrod@acm.org
Abstract:
AUTO is a software for continuation and bifurcation problems in
ordinary differential equations originally written in 1980 and widely
used in the dynamical systems community. Recently a modernization of
the program has been undertaken, including a translation from Fortran
to C, to improve several of its capabilities. First, AUTO has been
parallelized in a fashion that is portable to a range of parallel
architectures, and the code has been written to allow the
incorporation of a variety of low level communication protocols. The
two currently implemented protocols are explicit shared memory
multi-threading (using the standard Pthreads library) and message
passing (using MPI). Second, the object oriented scripting language
Python has been used to improve the user interface and provide
extended functionality. Two user interfaces have been developed using
Python; a graphical user interface (GUI) designed for the beginning
user, and a command line user interface (CLUI) designed for the
advanced user. The CLUI is especially useful for large batch
calculations, since Python's scripting capabilities allow small
programs to be written easily to control the computation without human
intervention.