A Month of Math Software – April 2012
Welcome to the 16th Month of Math Software where I take a tour around the news and new releases in the world of mathematical software. Thanks so much to this month’s contributors without whom I would really struggle to put this newsletter together. As always, the archives can be found at https://www.walkingrandomly.com/?cat=47 and if you have any news for next month then there are numerous ways in which to contact me.
Google Summer of Code
The world of Open Source mathematical software stands to gain heavily from this year’s Google Summer of Code. Projects include an attempt to port Scilab to Android, improvements to symbolic expressions in Sage, aerospace and signal processing blocksets for Xcos, Just In Time compilation for Octave and many many more. See http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/projects/list/google/gsoc2012 for the full list of projects.
Mathematics on GP-GPUs (General Purpose – Graphical Processing Units)
- An OpenCL implementation of the GPU linear algebra library, MAGMA, has been released. The practical upshot of this is that you can use GPU cards from manufacturers other than NVIDIA now. Version 0.1 Beta includes implementations of LU, QR, and Cholesky matrix factorisations.
- A beta version of AMD’s Accelerated Parallel Processing Math Libraries has been released.Version 1.7 beta includes some new BLAS Level 2 and 3 functions and is required for the MAGMA release mentioned above.
- Version 2.1 of AccelerEyes superb Jacket Toolbox has been released (last month in fact but I missed it) and includes support for unconstrained optimisation! The full change-log can be found at wiki.accelereyes.com/wiki/index.php/Release_Notes
- GPU Systems have released version 2.0 of their Libra SDK. According to the website ‘Libra is a cross processor, cross platform, cross language – standard math library and runtime API – for software application development.’ It supports both OpenCL and CUDA and multiple languages including C, C++, Java, C# and MATLAB.
- Benchmarking the new Kepler GTX680 – AccelerEyes compares NVIDIA’s new hardware with its old. The benchmarks are Matrix-Matrix Multiply, Fast Fourier Transform and sorting.
Python
- Version 0.7.3 of Pandas has been released. According to the website, Pandas aims to become the most powerful and flexible open source data analysis / manipulation tool available in any language Go to http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/dev/whatsnew.html to see what’s new.
- Version 0.4 of mathics has been released. ‘Mathics is a free, general-purpose online computer algebra system featuring Mathematica-compatible syntax and functions.’ The Mathics project is looking for more developers, contact Jan Pöschko if you’re interested.
Sparse Linear Systems
- PaStiX (http://pastix.gforge.inria.fr) is a scientific library that provides a high performance parallel solver for very large sparse linear systems based on direct methods and version 5.2 was released this month.
MATLAB add-ons
- Version 2.1 of LAMG (Lean Algebraic Multigrid) was released this month. LAMG is a fast graph Laplacian solver. It can solve Ax=b in O(m) time and storage, where A is the graph Laplacian of a weighted undirected graph with m edges. Free MATLAB code download: http://code.google.com/p/lamg/
- Version 4.2 of Chebfun is now available from http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/chebfun/. Chebfun is an open-source system written in Matlab that overloads Matlab’s operations for vectors and matrices to analogous operations for functions and operators. For an overview of what Chebfun can do, take a look at the collection of more than 100 Chebfun Examples posted at http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/chebfun/examples/
LAPACK – The standard for Linear Algebra
- LAPACK has seen a bug-fix release. See what’s new in version 3.4.1 at http://www.netlib.org/lapack/lapack-3.4.1.html
SPSS In decline?