system dynamics

December 21, 2010 5:47 PM

Maths-filter: please recommend some good resources (books, sites, software) for learning about numerical simulations of large (like 20+ dimensional) dynamical systems, especially in continuous time.

I have pretty basic Matlab and R skills, but that's about it... wondering if learning Mathematica would be worth the effort, or even something like C.

posted by moorooka to Technology (3 answers total)

I would do it in Matlab, probably with the parallel computing toolbox, but that's because I know Matlab an have access to a Matlab computing cluster :)

I imagine Simulink would be even better, but I don't know Simulink. No reccs on resources either, sorry. But I would pick up Simulink tutorials- I imagine this would be the sort of thing they'd go over.

Do you have a specific project or are you just interested in the general sort of problem?
posted by supercres at 7:07 PM on December 21, 2010

I used an old version of MatrixX, and it did what you need. Simulink is also a good option.

Although C is very, very powerful (and I love using it) I wouldn't recommend it for your needs, especially if you're not an expert on it yet.
posted by Simon Barclay at 7:59 PM on December 21, 2010

A steep learning curve, but C + OpenMPI + a job scheduler on a cluster (e.g. Sun Grid Engine) might be really useful to learn for this task.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:46 PM on December 21, 2010