The RP Photonics Software News > 2020-05-25

The Numerical Power Package for RP Fiber Power

You may have wondered why there were hardly any Software News postings in recent months. This was because for more than one year I was fairly busy with a big programming project (apart from many other things) on which I couldn't talk yet. However, this is now finished.

Most users of our main software product – RP Fiber Power are fully satisfied with its computation speed. Most of the supplied demo scripts can be executed on an ordinary PC within at most a couple of seconds, and in many practical applications, computational speed is no issue at all, even if a not particularly fast computer is used.

However, there are situations where a sophisticated simulation requires substantial computation time – particularly in the following contexts:

Propagation of ultrashort pulses: long computation times can result e.g. if one needs to propagate a pulse through a long fiber many times, or if strong nonlinear interactions and a large pulse bandwidth (particularly in conjunction with a long pulse duration) increase the computational demands.
Numerical beam propagation can also be demanding, e.g. when propagating through long fibers, particularly if a numerical grid with high resolution is required.

Therefore, some small percentage of the users of this software has applications where a substantially faster execution is quite desirable. To address that need, we are now offering (with moderate additional cost) the Numerical Power Package as an add-on to RP Fiber Power which provides the following:

You get a much improved speed in the above-mentioned cases – often more than a factor of 5, sometimes even more than a factor of 10.
It also greatly speeds up certain functions of the script language, mostly those concerning arrays and matrices.
In addition, it provides some more special functions, which you may use in your scripts for purposes like multiplying or inverting matrices.
The Bessel J function is delivered with higher accuracy. Also, Bessel functions are supported for complex arguments and not only for real arguments.

Some more numerical features of the Numerical Power Package may be developed, and those will then be delivered to existing customers as free updates.

On request, we can also offer the Numerical Power Package as an add-on to our other software products (e.g. RP Resonator), but as it affects only special functions there, this will probably be of interest only in rare cases.

You can find more details – in particular, the technical background and the requirements on the user's side – on a new page of our website, discussing the speed of RP Fiber Power.

This article is a posting of the RP Photonics Software News, authored by Dr. Rüdiger Paschotta. You may link to this page, because its location is permanent.

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