Walking Randomly

Welcome to my monthly round-up of news from the world of mathematical software.  As always, thanks to all contributors.  If you have any mathematical software news (releases, blog articles and son on), feel free to contact me.  For details on how to follow Walking Randomly now that Google Reader has died, see this post.

Numerics for .NET

• Version 3.0 of ILNumerics was released in June.  ILNumerics is a numerical library for .NET with syntax that’s similar to that of MATLAB.  See what’s new by clicking on http://ilnumerics.net/ilnumerics-version-3.0-is-online.html and follow the ILNumerics team on Twitter to keep right up to date with this product.

Faster, faster, FASTER!

• The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) have updated the parallel version of their commercial Fortran library to Mark 24.  Full details of all 1784 routines available at http://www.nag.co.uk/numeric/FL/nagdoc_fl24/html/GENINT/smpnews.html#SMPNEWS

Sparsification

• Version 1.0 of TxSSA has been released.  According to the project’s website, “TxSSA is an acronym for Tech-X Corporation Sparse Spectral Approximation. It is a library that has interfaces in C++, C, and MATLAB. It is an implementation of a matrix sparsification algorithm that takes a general real or complex matrix as input and produces a sparse output matrix of the same size. The non-zero entries are chosen to minimize changes to the singular values and singular vectors corresponding to the near null-space. The output matrix is constrained to preserve left and right null-spaces exactly. The sparsity pattern of the output matrix is automatically determined or can be given as input.”

Data and Statistics

• Stata is a commercial statistics package that’s been around since 1985.  It’s now at version 13 and has a bucket load of new functions and improvements.
• A new minor release of IDL (Interactive Data Language) from Exelis Visual Information Solutions has been released.  Details of version 8.2.3 can be found here.

Molten Mathematics

• Version 1.4 Beta of the free GPU accelerated Linear Algebra library, Magma has been released with a nice set of performance enhancements and new functions.
• The other Magma on the block is the commercial Magma Computational Algebra System which was updated to version 2.19-7 this month.

Some Freebies

• SMath studio is a free Mathcad clone developed by Andrey Ivashov.  Recently, Andrey has been releasing nee versions of Smath much more regularly and it is now at version 0.96.4909.  To see what’s been added in June, see the forum posts here and here.
• Rene Grothmann’s very frequently updated Euler Math Toolbox is now at version 22.8.  As always, Rene’s detailed version log tells you what’s new.

Safe and reliable numerical computing

• Sollya 4.0 was released earlier this month and is available for download at: http://sollya.gforge.inria.fr/.  According to the developers, “Sollya is both a tool environment and a library for safe floating-point code development. It offers a convenient way to perform computations with multiple precision interval arithmetic. It is particularly targeted to the automatized implementation of mathematical floating-point libraries (libm).”
• The INTLAB toolbox for MATLAB is now at version 7.1. INTLAB is the MATLAB toolbox for reliable computing and self-validating algorithms.

Pythonic Mathematics

• Version 5.10 of Sage, the free Computer Algebra System based on Python, was released on 17th June.  Martin Albrect discusses some of his favourite new goodies over at his blog and the full list of new stuff is on the Sage changelog.
• Pandas is Python’s main data analysis library and version 0.12 is out.  Take a look at the newness here.