Hi, I am afraid that once these papers are published, we no longer have the copyright to it (I know it's weird but that is how academic papers work ...). So they are all on IEEE servers or some other journals. The only thing I could find is a link to some slides for a talk at the NUSOD conference but it is short on details. I have not used cite seer in nearly a decade since the advent of Google Scholar ... We do use geometric optics for this with a few exceptions (i.e. anti-reflection coatings used to increase extraction efficiency use a multi-layer plane wave transfer matrix method to get an effective reflection coefficient). But this is getting a bit off-topic so back on to the code ...

Are any of the intro papers on google available as free, full text? That is my reason for going to citeseer ( as it turns out they even seem to allow text format download ) AFAIK all of the papers are available for free(IEEE is about the worst in terms of open access, including for searching with scripts or using computer methods,LOL).

Are these all homogeneous materials with a few planar discontinuities ? Offhand it seems you could do a lot analytically with classical geometrical optics.

================================================================================= Thanks for the code sample. It is not what I envisioned originally but I was not aware that threads were that expensive to create/destroy; this is fancier but makes more sense. I guess this will be my starting point, along with most of the Fortran code that I will be keeping.

Actually, the while loop lives inside the threads, since creating and destroying threads is relatively expensive, and you don't need to.

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Did I understand you correctly ? It's a good idea and, from the little I know on the subject, it sounds a lot like a "thread pool".

Yes, it's exactly a thread pool.

Thanks again, Michel Lestrade Crosslight Software