Hello Juan, I have some experience with Julia's BigNums and have experimented with faster fixed precision (128 bits) floating point type implementations (and don't know about Julia's Matrix work, and am not involved with GSoC). For a small first place, I suggest something that will increase your depth with BigFloats and as a nice addition may provide some generally useful intermediation functions. Whatever else you may do in software that focuses on floating point precision and accuracy extension, you are likely to lean on BigFloats in development and testing of floating point math -- even when it does not use BigFloats directly. You might experiment with BigFloat interconversion with Float64 and Float32 values (back and forth and forth and back) to notice situations where things seem good at first glance, until some values that ought be the same are not. There are different ways to go to/from BigFloats and Float64s, it is not exciting -- and can be exasperating. Let me know if that is the direction you want to take: it involves no matrix work, and offers no great feats of algorithmic speed. You might get a broader sense of Julia by starting with small but less narrowly focused task.
On Saturday, March 12, 2016 at 12:33:41 PM UTC-5, Juan Lopez wrote: Hello everyone, I am looking into GSoC this year and I really like your Matrix functions and Fast Bignums projects. My background is in computer science, I'm in my 3rd year in Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and I've worked with MATLAB and Octave before. I have also taken several courses in linear algebra and have experience in competitive programming. My competence level in C and C++ is good, average haskell and getting my hands on Julia. I think your org is awesome because it brings high-performance and ease of use for technical computing and offers foreign function interface to look for advantages in languages like python, c, fortran, etc. Is there anyone interested in mentoring any of these projects? Also, could someone point me to some issues/small projects to get started? I look forward to your replies, Juan López
