I had used Scilab for learning Digital Image Processing. It is a good open source alternative to Matlab. Although it has a good foundation, it was very clear that it was improvement was still possible. In a recent image processing workshop, I learnt that the Scilab community had open sourced the source code on GitHub. Keeping in mind that the software is continually evolving, I knew I could put my optimization skills to good use. So, I dug into the code-base and found a few optimizable programs. So, I decided to inculcate parallelism into matrix norm calculation program, which is quite simple yet used by many other subprograms and external function calls. https://github.com/opencollab/scilab/blob/master/scilab/modules/linear_algebra/src/c/norm.c There were many potential areas for optimization: Elimination of redundant comparisons Use else if construct to remove redundant checks Remove floating point equality comparison! Embarrassingly parallel/perfect ly parallel for l...