Walking Randomly

Welcome to July’s Month of Math Software, my regular summary of news and releases in the world of software for the mathematically inclined.  If you have a news item that you’d like to share in next month’s offering then feel free to contact me to discuss it.  If you like what you see here then take a look at some of the previous editions.

Commercial Software Releases

• VSN International have released version 14 of their data analysis tool, Genstat for the biosciences.  Interestingly, they also have a cut-down free version of Genstat for teaching use in schools and Universities.
• Jacket, the most feature-complete GPU toolbox for MATLAB, was updated to version 1.8 this month with a whole host of new features and functions.  Jacket’s sister project, libJacket– a GPU library for C/C++/Fortran and Python, also saw an update to version 1.1.
• Version 12 of the general purpose statistical package, STATA,  has been released.  Click here to get the large pdf file that announces this release and tells us what’s new.
• 2.17-10 of the computer algebra package, MAGMA, has been release.

Freeware and Open Source Software Releases

• If you are working with statistics then R is probably the software package that you need to be using, no matter what operating system you prefer.  Version 2.13.1 was released on July 8th and details of what’s new can be found at http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/NEWS.R-2.13.1.html
• Scilab, a high quality free alternative to MATLAB, has seen a minor upgrade.  Version 5.3.3 corrects a couple of bugs.
• Numpy is a Python add-on that is almost essential if you plan to use Python for numerical computing.  It adds support for vectors and matrices to Python along with facilities such as random number generation and FFTs.  Numpy was upgraded to version 1.6.1, a bugfix release,  on July 20th.
• PLASMA (The Parallel Linear Algebra for Scalable Multi-core Architectures) has seen a bug-fix release with version 2.4.1

Blog articles

• StrongInference has put up a great article about the upcoming IPython 0.11.  IPython is an enhanced interactive python shell that includes things such as matplotlib integration, interactive parallel computing and more.  It’s great for the sort of interactive scientific calculations that people might otherwise use MATLAB and Mathematica for.



• The Mathworks show us how to calculate the Mandelbrot factal on a GPU using the Parallel Computing Toolbox.
• Wolfram Research officially launch the CDF document format.  Learn how to embed them into webpages.
• Over at Playing with Mathematica, Sol has gone crazy with Mathematica clocks.