In this paper, we report on very efficient algorithms for the spherical
harmonic transform (SHT). Explicitly vectorized variations of the algorithm
based on the Gauss-Legendre quadrature are discussed and implemented in the
SHTns library which includes scalar and vector transforms. The main
breakthrough is to achieve very efficient on-the-fly computations of the
Legendre associated functions, even for very high resolutions, by taking
advantage of the specific properties of the SHT and the advanced capabilities
of current and future computers. This allows us to simultaneously and
significantly reduce memory usage and computation time of the SHT. We measure
the performance and accuracy of our algorithms. Even though the complexity of
the algorithms implemented in SHTns are in O(N3) (where N is the maximum
harmonic degree of the transform), they perform much better than any third
party implementation, including lower complexity algorithms, even for
truncations as high as N=1023. SHTns is available at
https://bitbucket.org/nschaeff/shtns as open source software.Comment: 8 page