Walking Randomly

Welcome to the last 2012 edition of A Month of Math Software..slightly delayed thanks to the December festivities.  Thanks to everyone who’s contributed news items over the last 2 years, please feel free to continue contacting me throughout 2013 and beyond.

AccelerEyes sells the MATLAB Jacket to The Mathworks

• AccelerEyes are the developers of GPU accelerated products such as Jacket for MATLAB and ArrayFire for C, C++, and Fortran.  In a recent blog post, they announced that they have sold Jacket to The Mathworks.  It will be interesting to see how The Mathworks integrate this technology into the Parallel Computing Toolbox (PCT) in the future.  I sincerely hope that they don’t split the PCT into two products, one for GPUs and the other for CPUs!

Free computer algebra

• Maxima hit release 5.29-1 in December.  Here’s the changelog.
• Sage version 5.5 has been released. Here’s the changelog.
• Euler is at version 20.

Numerical Libraries

• Version 5.3 of the ACML linear algebra library for AMD-based systems was released in December.
• Another of AMD’s libraries was updated this month.  The Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) SDK hit version 2.8 and includes a preview of AMD’s new C++ template library, Codename “Bolt.”.  According to AMD, Bolt ‘makes it easier for developers to utilize the inherent performance and power efficiency benefits of heterogeneous computing’ The press release for this version of the APP SDK is available at http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/APP-SDK-Bolt-CodeXL-Press-Release.pdf.  Also, click here for more details concerning Bolt
• Numeric Javascript saw two releases, v1.2.5 and v1.2.6
• The HSL Software Library was updated this month adding three new routines to support Fredholm alternative for singular systems, efficient multiplication of the factors by a vector, and sparse forward solve.
• amgcl is an accelerated algebraic multigrid for C++.  According to the software’s website ‘You can use amgcl to solve large sparse system of linear equations in three simple steps: first, you have to select method components (this is a compile time decision); second, the AMG hierarchy has to be constructed from a system matrix; and third, the hierarchy is used to solve the equation system for a given right-hand side’

Data Analysis and Visualisation

• GNU Data language is now at version 0.9.3.  This is a ‘free, open source incremental compiler compatible with IDL and to some extent with PV-WAVE‘.  There are some great screen shots on their website.
• DISLIN is at version 10.2.7.  DISLIN is a high-level plotting library for C and Fortran.
• Version 0.10.0 of Pandas, The Python Data Analysis Library, was released in December 2012.

Maple IDE

• DigiArea have released an Eclipse based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Maple called, simply, Maple IDE.  This commercial product is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X and seems to be a very similar concept to Wolfram’s Workbench for Mathematica.

Spreadsheets

• Gnumeric, a free spreadsheet program, is now at version 1.12.
• Version 3.6.4 of LibreOffice, the free office suite for multiple operating systems, was released this month.  The release notes are at http://www.libreoffice.org/download/release-notes/. The spreadsheet component is called Calc and the list of features new to the 3.6.x branch can be found at http://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-6-new-features-and-fixes/

Commercial Number Theory

• MAGMA is now at version v2.19.2