Writing scientific software : a guide for good style / Suely Oliveira and David E. Stewart.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Oliveira, Suely, author.

Stewart, David, 1961- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Computer software--Development.

Computer software.

Software engineering.

Science--Data processing.

Science.

Science--Software.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 303 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Language Note:

English

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.

Contents:

pt. I. Numerical software

Why numerical software?

Scientific computation and numerical analysis

Priorities

Famous disasters

Exercises

pt. II. Developing software

Basics of computer organization

Software design

Data structures

Design for testing and debugging

pt. III. Efficiency in time, efficiency in memory

Be algorithm aware

Computer architecture and efficiency

Global vs. local optimization

Grabbing memory when you need it

Memory bugs and leaks

pt. IV. Tools

Sources of scientific software

Unix tools

pt. V. Design examples

Cubic spline function library

Multigrid alogrithms.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references (p. 293-298) and index.

ISBN:

1-107-16719-1

1-280-70261-3

9786610702619

0-511-24616-1

0-511-24685-4

0-511-24470-3

0-511-31877-4

0-511-61797-6

0-511-24545-9

OCLC:

171139885