Section: Software

MUESLI: Scientific computing

Participant : Édouard Canot [corresponding author] .

Doing linear algebra with sparse and dense matrices is somehow difficult in scientific computing. Specific libraries do exist to deal with this area (e.g. BLAS and LAPACK for dense matrices, SPARSKIT for sparse ones) but their use is often awful and tedious, mainly because of the large number of arguments which must be used. Moreover, classical libraries do not provide dynamic allocation. Lastly, the two types of storage (sparse and dense) are so different that the user must know in advance the storage used in order to declare correctly the corresponding numerical arrays.

MUESLI is designed to help in dealing with such structures and it provides the convenience of coding in Fortran with a matrix-oriented syntax; its aim is therefore to speed-up development process and to enhance portability. It is a Fortran 95 library split in two modules: (i) FML (Fortran Muesli Library) contains all necessary material to numerically work with a dynamic array (dynamic in size, type and structure), called mfArray ; (ii) FGL (Fortran Graphics Library) contains graphical routines (some are interactive) which use the mfArray objects.

MUESLI includes some parts of the following numerical libraries: Arpack, Slatec, SuiteSparse, Triangle, BLAS and LAPACK.

Linux is the platform which has been used for developing and testing MUESLI. Whereas the FML part (numerical computations) should work on any platform (e.g. Win32, Mac OS X, Unix), the FGL part is intended to be used only with X11 (i.e. under all UNIXes).

Last version of MUESLI is 2.6.6 (2012-08-29). More information can be found at: http://people.irisa.fr/Edouard.Canot/muesli