Select which Boost ODE methods to initially support about forest HOT 6 OPEN

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.

from forest.

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

from forest.

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

from forest.

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.

from forest.

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

from forest.

@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.

from forest.