Walking Randomly

Welcome to the latest Month of Math Software where I look back over May 2013 and pick out items of interest in the world of mathematical software.  As always, thanks to everyone who contributed news items this month– I couldn’t do these posts without you.  Feel free to contact me if you have any news you’d like to share in future editions.

Connecting MATLAB with Mathematica

• MATLink is a free project that connects Mathematica with MATLAB.  If you are lucky enough to have both systems, you can now use them seamlessly together.  Version 1.0 was released in May.

Octave news

GNU Octave is an open source system for numerical computing that is broadly compatible with MATLAB.

• Michael Goffioul has compiled and released GNU Octave 3.6.4 for Windows using Microsoft Visual Studio.  Michael’s builds are the ones I prefer to use on Windows systems.  The installer includes 82 packages from Octave Forge (Octave Forge packages are the Octave analogue of MATLAB Toolboxes).  It doesn’t appear to include the experimental Graphical User Interface that’s being worked on by the Octave team.
• OctConf 2013 is a conference that brings together users and developers of Octave.  This year it is held in Milan and user registration is now open.  I sincerely wish I could attend but my personal life has gotten in the way!
• Google’s Summer of Code (GSoC) awards stipends to students to work on various open source projects.  This year, Octave will have 9 students working under the auspices of this program.  Here are the detaills (The original source for this is at http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/Welcome-GSoC-students-td4653374.html)
  • Ahsan Said will be working on the Agora website (http://agora.octave.org).  His mentor is Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
  • Vytautas Jančauskas will fix audio processing for Octave.  He will be mentored by Mike Miller.
  • Gedeone will implement a general purpose finite element method library. His mentor is Carlo de Falco.
  • Andrej Lojdl  wants to give Octave a native TeX rendering engine for plots. Patric Noffke is his mentor.
  • Carnë Draug needs to polish the Octave-Forge image processing package for his PhD thesis and make it handle N-dimensional images.  Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso is mentoring.
  • Matheus Vieira Portela will produce a GUI for manipulating closed-loop systems and incorporate it into the control package. Doug Stewart is his mentor.
  • Riupeng Li will incorporate incomplete sparse LU and Cholesky factorisations. Mentors will be  Youssef Saad, originator of the ITSOL library  and Carlo de Falco.
  • Kai Torben Ohlhus will also coordinate with Riupeng and Carlo and work on other parts of the sparse LU and Cholesky factorisations. Nir Krakauer will be the Mentor.
  • LYH will continue Max Brister’s previous GSoC work for giving Octave a JIT compiler, and John Eaton will mentor him.

Numerical Algorithms Group

• The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) have released Mark 24 of their superb, commercial Fortran numerical library.  Mark 1 of this library was released way back in 1971 and only included 98 routines whereas Mark 24 has over 1,700!  See what’s new in Mark 24 at http://www.nag.co.uk/numeric/FL/newatmark24

Maple’s 25th Birthday

• Maple turned 25 back in April but I somehow missed this piece of news when I wrote April’s Month of Math Software.  To celebrate, Maplesoft have published a timelime showing keydates in the company’s history.  It’s also worth checking out this Happy Birthday post over at MaplePrimes.

Linear Algebra

• Jack Dongarra and Mark Gates have updated their survey of freely available software for the solution of linear algebra problems.

Free Stuff

• A new version of SMath Studio, a freeware program inspired by Mathcad, is now available.  Get version 0.96.4868 and see what’s new at http://en.smath.info/forum/yaf_postst1778_SMath-Studio-0-96-4868–30-May-2013.aspx
• Pari is a free computer algebra system designed for fast computations in number theory.  Version 2.5.4 was released in May and all of the new stuff is documentated at http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/pub/pari/unix/pari-2.5.4.changelog
• A new version of Math-o-mir, a free software tool designed to write and edit mathematical equations as easily as possible, has been released.  See what’s new in version 1.8 at http://mathomir.wordpress.com/2013/05/20/the-math-o-mir-v1-8-released/

Optimization

• CUTEst, the latest evolution of the constrained and unconstrained testing environment for numerical optimization by Nick Gould, Dominique Orban and Philippe Toint is now available at http://ccpforge.cse.rl.ac.uk/gf/project/cutest/wiki/ 
• NOMAD is a blackbox optimisation software that’s just been updated to version 3.6

Finite Elements and PDEs

• Wolfrgang Bangerth of Texas A&M University has recorded a set of lectures on various aspects of finite elements and scientific computing.  It has a focus on the deal.II library but also discusses more general scientific computing topics such as which preconditioners to use, adaptive mesh refinement, time dependent problems, parallel computing, using tools such as Visit, Paraview and Eclipse, debugging, etc.
• PETSc version 3.4 was released in May.  PETSc is a suite of data structures and routines for the scalable (parallel) solution of scientific applications modeled by partial differential equations.  Notable new features include a system for managing unstructured grids with PDE solvers in DMPlex.  Capability and performance improvements to the algebraic multigrid preconditioners PCGAMG, many new nonlinear solvers in SNES, many improvements to the ODE solvers in TS including the new TSEIMEX, and support for parallel dense linear algebra using MatElemental.  The library also has better encapsulation and better control of symbols.

GPU Accelerated Mathematics

• MAGMA MIC 1.0 for Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors has been released.  This well known, free GPU accelerated linear algebra library also has versions for NVIDIA CUDA and OpenCL.
• GPULib from Tech-X provides GPU acceleration for users of IDL.  Version 1.6 of GPULib was released in May which adds over 100 linear algebra routines via a Magma wrapper and the ability to load and execute custom CUDA kernels at runtime among the release enhancements.
• Release 17 of CULA Dense, a GPU accelerated dense linear algebra package from EM Photonics, has been relased.    The release notes are available at http://www.culatools.com/files/docs/R17/release_notes_R17.txt
• EM Photonics have also released a new version of CULA Sparse.  See what’s new in version S5 at http://www.culatools.com/files/docs/S5/release_notes_sparse_S5.txt

Statistics

• A new version of RStudio, the free Integrated Development Environment, for R has been released.  Version 0.97.551 has got lots of new goodies.

 From the blogs

• Cleve Moler has been animating the golden spiral using MATLAB.
• Making formluas for Pi and the Pink Panther and pretty much everthing else with Mathematica.
• Why Would a Mathematica user care about R?
• Beware the behaviour of SMOOTH – Floating point shenanigans using IDL
• Passing Julia Callback Functions to C
• Building GUIs with Julia part 1 and part 2