Section 3.3. GNU Scientific Library

3.3. GNU Scientific Library

High-performance computing applications that need to be ported to Linux require a support library that closely matches scientific libraries from UNIX operating platforms. The equivalent library available on Linux is the GNU Scientific Library (GSL). The GSL is a collection of routines for numeric computing. The routines have been written from scratch in C, and present a modern API for C programmers, allowing wrappers to be written for very high-level languages. The source code is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

The library covers a wide range of topics in numeric computing. Table 3-3 shows the available routines from GNU GSL.

Table 3-3. GNU Scientific Library Routines

Complex Numbers	Roots of Polynomials	Quasi-Random Sequences
Special Functions	Vectors and Matrices	Statistics
Permutations	Combinations	N-Tuples
Sorting	BLAS Support	Simulated Annealing
Linear Algebra	CBLAS Library	Interpolation
Fast Fourier Transforms	Eigensystems	Chebyshev Approximations
Random Numbers	Quadrature	Discrete Hankel Transforms
Random Distributions	Differential Equations	Minimization
Histograms	Numerical Differentiation	Physical Constants
Monte Carlo Integration	Series Acceleration	Root-Finding
Least-Squares Fitting	IEEE Floating-Point

The use of these routines is described in the GSL manual.^[7] Each chapter provides detailed definitions of the functions, followed by example programs and references to the articles on which the algorithms are based.

^[7] www.gnu.org/software/gss/manual/