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Due to a system failure, the PALP Wiki needs to be reinstalled.

We apologize for the temporary outage.

This Wiki is meant to serve as a discussion platform for developing PALP++, a dynamical and object oriented version of PALP, A Package for Analyzing Lattice Polytopes with applications to toric geometry, for registered users.

To register and/or for more information contact skarke@hep.itp.tuwien.ac.at or rebhana@hep.itp.tuwien.ac.at.

Contents

Introduction

This Wiki owes its existence to the late Maximilian (Max) Kreuzer (1960-2010). Max was the creator of PALP (with Harald Skarke, 2002). The original intention of the package had been to make various routines, many of which were written in the context of the classification of reflexive polytopes in three and four dimensions, available to a general public. Given the very specific scope of these first applications, PALP turned out to be surprisingly versatile. This led to quite a number of extensions (mainly driven by Max, but with new collaborators like Erwin Riegler or Nils-Ole Walliser), some of which still await publication.

With an increasing number of applications, however, PALP's limitations became more and more noticeable. In particular, the earlier emphasis on computation time in the context of low dimensional reflexive polytopes had led to a structure where many parameters are fixed upon compilation. The explicit polytope (rather than ray) representation employed by PALP made the generalisation to questions concerning cones and fans (e.g. reflexive Gorenstein cones, Mori cones) rather awkward. Besides, the C programming language with its lack of support for object-oriented structures is not really suited for a multi-programmer project of the size to which PALP grew.

For all of these reasons, Max felt the need for a renewed version PALP++ that would address these concerns. As a result of his illness and death, he was not able to pursue this goal himself. He talked to quite a number of people about his ideas and he started to work on a manuscript that would outline the general strategy; unfortunately, he was not able to finish it. Basically Max hoped that a number of people with a common interest in lattice polyhedra and toric geometry would share the task of creating PALP++. The present Wiki is intended as a platform for this project.

PALP++ related documents by Max Kreuzer

Slides of a talk at Extremal Laurent polynomials, Warwick, Oct. 20, 2009, containing a PALP++ wishlist
Unfinished draft, dated September 2010, where Max collected some of his ideas about PALP++, what it should be and how it might be designed and implemented by a team of users so that PALP++ would grow along with its applications, but overcoming the design limitations of PALP.

Resources on PALP

static web page for PALP up to version 1.1
original publication of M. Kreuzer and H. Skarke

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