On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 10:43 PM, Hugh Aguilar <hughaguila...@yahoo.com>wrote:
> > We are doing numerical integration of celestial bodies over large > periods of time (100 years is a norm). > > I'm new to Scheme, so I may be totally wrong about this --- but, isn't a > numerical program like this exactly what Scheme is *not* designed for? > The Supercomputer Toolkit ( http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/94/HPL-94-30.html ) was designed for doing numerical integration of celestial bodies over large periods of time. "The Toolkit's compiler uses a novel strategy based upon partial evaluation [7, 9]. This exploits the data-independence of typical numerical algorithms to generate exceptionally efficient object code from source programs that are expressed in terms of highly abstract components written in the Scheme dialect of Lisp [14]." "The integrator and the force law were written as high level Scheme programs. The accumulation of position was implemented in quad precision (128 bits), and the required quad precision operators were written in Scheme." "In hindsight, the use of quad precision appears to have been overly conservative for this problem" -- ~jrm
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