Research and quilting have a similar Zen in that both combine and build upon multiple prior works. But the workflow is difficult to reproduce in research software: how can we combine group X’s state-of-the-art ODE solver with group Z’s state-of-the-art parallel linear algebra to create Y’s new biology model when they all use different libraries and conventions? This is the problem that Julia tackles head on, thanks to it’s innovative type system and multiple dispatch. In “Shared Memory Parallelization of Banded Block-Banded Matrices” we describe how to combine the parallelization capabilities from one package (SharedArrays) with the specialized matrix of another (BlockBandedMatrices.jl) – without modifying the internals of either.
This work follows on from a NumFOCUS sponsored collaboration at Imperial College between the Research Computing Service and Sheehan Olver in the Department of Mathematics.