Select which Boost ODE methods to initially support

[nicklafarge]

No description provided.

[rjpower4]

For reference, the boost Steppers are:

• Euler
• Modified Midpoint
• Runge-Kutta 4
• Runge-Kutta Cash-Karp 54
• Runge-Kutta Dopri5
• Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg 78
• Adams-Bashforth
• Adams-Bashforth-Moulton
• Bulirsch-Stoer
• Implicit Euler
• Rosenbrock 4
• Symplectic Euler
• Symplectic RKN McLachlan
• Velocity Verlet

Additionally they have controlled and dense output forms of these.

[rjpower4]

Do we plan on requiring Boost or do we want to allow use of other packages such as SUNDIALS... 😅

[nicklafarge]

I'm definitely interested in exploring other options. The "choice" of boost so far is an inherited one from prior work, not for any specific reason. I guess we need to learn enough about what options are out there to make an informed choice as to which one is "best" for our project - or if there is a use case for supporting more than one. Some considerations that go along with any potential choices are understanding licensing, minimum supported c++ versions, and perhaps (eventually) benchmarks to see if there is a speed increase.

Exploring other underlying integration implementations is could also be a 2.0 task. Maybe we should prioritize getting the project up and running with boost, and then later revisit that choice and evaluate how we might improve it

[rjpower4]

I think that sticking to boost at this point is a good call, but I think that we should try to design an abstraction around the integrator.

[nicklafarge]

That sounds good. The current prototype has some repeated code anyway in that regard for converging events, so a degree of abstraction there would be helpful regardless of what other options we pursue

[nicklafarge]

@rjpower4 I'm guessing you know a ton more about these options off the cuff than I do, so I'm wondering what insight you may have about them. I currently use Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg 78 exclusively. What sorts of motivations are there for the others? I think maybe, for now, we should have specific reasons for whichever ones we choose to initially support.