Numerical Recipes & Scientific Libraries

I attended a talk on how to use Quest, Northwestern University’s TOP500 supercomputer(At least during June 2010). Most of it was a routine introduction to MPI, but one interesting question raised was what routines we should be using in our scientific computing codes. A lot of holdouts were still using [ Numerical Recipes] for their research-level codes, which strikes me as a backwards way about it. Numerical Recipes is a starting point, and probably not the best thing to use: it has awful licensing and might not even be that reliable!

Most of these people come to the same conclusion:

• Read Numerical Recipes for a broad overview of a particular subject.
• Look up the references in Numerical Recipes for that topic.
• See if GNU Scientific Library has the library you need; if so, use that instead.

The one last thing(well, exception) I want to mention is that ATLAS or Intel MKL should be used when possible over the Netlib BLAS.