Public application template

A: An introduction

My name is Roberto Porcù, I'm italian and I'm 25 years old. I've studied Maths Engineering at Politecnico di Milano and I graduated 22 April 2013. On November 2013 I will start the PhD program at Politecnico di Milano.
- I can speak italian and english.
- My overall background: numerical computing, maths, physics, applied maths, optimization, parallel computing, cfd.
I want to partecipate to SOCIS to increase my knowledge about some topics and take part to the development of programs.
- No previous experiences in SOCIS.
I used Octave very much during my university career and I like Open Source programs, I want to help in developing Octave and make it better than other non-free programs.

Nickname: robbbs88
I will be in Toronto (Canada) until September the 5 and here it is UTC-5. After September the 5 I will be in Italy (UTC+1).
I usually code around 10.00 to 17.00 and could also try to start earlier (~9.00) for few days.

This part is one of the more important ones in your application. You are allowed to be as verbose as you want, as long as you stay on topic ;-)

I've a good experience with C++ and Octave because I've used them a lot at university, for many exams.
I've a good experience with Fortran, OpenMP, MPI and CUDA.
I've worked together with 4 other students for an exam at university. We had to work for 3 different days on a project, for 5 hours per day and each time we had to complete a different project, usually on data structures and Algebric algorithms such as matrices decomposition.
The biggest code I've written was for my thesis. I took an exsisting code written in Fortran that was useful to simulate the Brownout effect and I modified this code to make it working in parallel on 2 GPUs NVIDIA Tesla 2070M-Q using CUDA for Fortran.
I've not yet contributed to Octave but I've written in Octave a class of solutors for classical Hamiltonian mechanics systems which makes use of Spectral Variational Integrators.

Please describe (in short) your experience with the following tools:
- IRC and mailing lists: good experience.
- Mercurial or other source code management systems: not big experience.
- Mediawiki or other wiki software: not big experience.
- make, gcc, gdb or other development tools: very good experience.
What will make you actively stay in our community after this GSoC is over? Work on other applications close or not to what I've already done.

I've heard about Octave at the university.
- I've been involved in using Octave for at least 4 years at the university.

I work with Ubuntu 10.04 and Ubuntu 12.10.
- If you have access to more than one, please state them and the conditions under which you are granted this access.
Please estimate an average time per day you will be able to access
- an internet connection: 12 hours
- a computer: 12 hours
- a computer with your progressing work on: 12 hours
Please describe the degree up to which you can install new software on computers you have access to: complete possibility to install new software.

Please describe how useful criticism looks from your point of view as committing student: I think that positive criticism is the most important thing when developing a program.
How autonomous are you when developing?
- Do you like to discuss changes intensively and not start coding until you know what you want to do? Not much.
- 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? Yes, definitely.

Did you select a task from our list of proposals and ideas? Yes, definitely.
- I chose the idea: Geometric integrators for Hamiltonian Systems. Link: http://wiki.octave.org/Summer_of_Code_Project_Ideas#Geometric_integrators_for_Hamiltonian_Systems . In particular I want to focus on the implementation of the first five methods listed in that proposal and so in the creation of a new package for geometric integrators.
Rough estimated timeline: for the first days of September I should have completed all the solvers (all well functioning). For the first days of October I should have added some functionalities to those solvers (on the basis of the community suggestions but I will take into account to complete and add 2 or 3 points of the suggested idea Matlab-compatible ODE solvers in core-Octave, link http://wiki.octave.org/Summer_of_Code_Project_Ideas#Matlab-compatible_ODE_solvers_in_core-Octave). During the last month, so until November, I will optimize the code, make tests and a demo and also a documentation.