MaRDI Open Interfaces

MaRDI Open Interfaces is a project aiming to improve interoperability in scientific computing by removing two hurdles that computational scientists usually face in their daily work.

These hurdles are the following. First, numerical solvers are often implemented in different programming languages. Second, these solvers have potentially significantly diverging interfaces in terms of function names, order of function arguments, and the invokation order. Therefore, when a computational scientist wants to switch from one solver to another, it could take non-negligible effort in code modification and testing for the correctness.

Open Interfaces aim to alleviate these problems by providing automatic data marshalling between different languages and a set of interfaces for typical numerical problems such as integration of differential equations and optimization.

Installation for development

Use conda or mamba package manager:

mamba env create -n env-name -f environment-linux.yaml

if you use Linux or

mamba env create -n env-name -f environment-macos.yaml

Build

To build the software, use command

    make

which invokes underlying CMake build and builds software inside the build directory.

Quality assurance during development

To ensure code consistency, we use pre-commit. It is configured to run multiple checks for formatting and trailing whitespace for all source code in the repo. During development, the checks can be run automatically by installing a pre-commit Git hook:

pre-commit install

or by invoking it manually via

pre-commit run --all-files

We recommend running it automatically so that the code is pushed only after formatting checks.

Run examples

One needs set PYTHONPATH:

export PYTHONPATH=src/oif/backend_python/src:

Run examples from Python

To run examples on invoking quadratic solver from Python, run

python examples/call_qeq_from_python.py [c|python]

where backend specification is optional and defaults to C backend.

Run examples from C

To run examples on invoking quadratic solver from Python, run

build/examples/call_qeq_from_c [c|python]

where backend specification is optional and defaults to C backend.