User:Rli

A: An introduction

• Please describe yourself in three sentences, one of them regarding your current studies.

My name is Ruipeng Li, a PhD student in Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Minnesota, advised by Prof Yousef Saad. My research interests include sparse matrix computations, parallel computing, iterative linear solvers.

• • Which languages do you speak? Chinese, English.

• • What's your overall background? Computer science

• Why do you want to participate in the Google Summer of Code? What do you hope to gain by doing so?

Practicing writing large public software and gain such experience.

• Why are you choosing Octave?

Matlab/Octave are extensively used in our research. I would like to make some contribution.

C: Contact

• Please state the (unique and identical where possible) nick you use on IRC and any other communication channel related to Octave. rli
• Which time zone do you live in? Will that change over GSoC duration? UTC/GMT -6 hours. Yes, July 15 - Aug 05, UTC/GMT +8 hours.
• Please state the time frame (in UTC+0) when you feel most comfortable working during GSoC. Where are your time buffers? 10:00 to 19:00

E: Coding experience

• Please describe your experience with C++, Octave or Matlab m-scripts, OpenGL and Qt. 10-year experience with C/C++. 5-year experience with Matlab.
• Please describe your experience with other programming languages. Fotran, CUDA.
• Please describe your experience with being in a development team.

During internships in NVIDIA and Stoneridge technology, I participated in developing large software package.

• Please describe the biggest project you have written code for and what you learned by doing so. Also describe your role in that project over time.

Lead programmer of RBG (a parallel/distributed particle collision simulator)

Lead programmer of CUDA-ITSOL (iterative solver for GPU acceleration)

Lead programmer of MLR (a multilevel low-rank preconditioner)

• Please state the commits and patches you already contributed to Octave. None.

F: Feeling fine

• Please describe (in short) your experience with the following tools:
  • IRC and mailing lists. None
  • Mercurial or other source code management systems. Using perforce to manage all my codes.
  • Mediawiki or other wiki software. None.
  • make, gcc, gdb or other development tools. Frequently write makefile to compile and debug using gdb/ddd.
• What will make you actively stay in our community after this GSoC is over? Next GSoC ?

O: Only out of interest

• Did you ever hear about Octave before? yes.
  • If so, when and where? How far have you been involved already? Starting from a course in 2009, sometimes use Octave as an alternative to Matlab.
  • If not, where would you expect or advise us to do advertising?
• What was the first question concerning Octave you could not find an answer to rather quickly? Is Octave faster than Matlab?

P: Prerequisites

• Please state the operating system you work with. Linux
• Please estimate an average time per day you will be able to (if separated) access
  • an internet connection. 10 hours
  • a computer. 10 hours
  • a computer with your progressing work on. 8 hours
• Please describe the degree up to which you can install new software on computers you have access to.

I can install new software on my home computer. For the computer in the office, I need to ask for the operators.

S: Self-assessment

• Please describe how useful criticism looks from your point of view as committing student. An effective way to evaluate the work.
• How autonomous are you when developing? During my development of the above projects, I only discussed with my advisor on algorithms but worked independently on the implementation.
  • Do you like to discuss changes intensively and not start coding until you know what you want to do? Yes, that is my way: never start with uncertainty.
  • Do you like to code a proof of concept to 'see how it turns out', modifying that and taking the risk of having work thrown away if it doesn't match what the project or original proponent had in mind? I would say no. I would like to write something useful eventually.

Y: Your task

• Did you select a task from our list of proposals and ideas?

Incomplete sparse factorizations ichol, ilu [1]

• Please provide a rough estimated timeline for your work on the task.

Probably 1.5 months to implement ichol, ilu and 1 month to test