
adolc-revolve 0.99

author: Eli Kahn

Overview:

Automatic differentiation is a usefull tool for computing derivatives for
functions which can't be differentiated analytically. ADOLC is a software
package which implements such an algorithm. The main problem with it are the
huge memory requirements. To address this the checkpointing algorithm was
developed. The same authors of ADOLC have written another software called
revolve which implements the checkpointing algorithm.

As of now these two programs are seperate software packages. The purpose of
this software package is to make it easier to combine both automatic
differentiation with checkpointing for computing derivatives of large scalar
functions of many variables.

This program does not use any system calls like fork or pipe to implement
checkpointing. The entire program runs in a single address which may be
advantagous in certain situations. I have tested it on linux but I see no
reason why it shouldn't run on other platforms.


