{"id":4594,"date":"2012-11-04T11:49:24","date_gmt":"2012-11-04T10:49:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=4594"},"modified":"2012-11-04T11:50:09","modified_gmt":"2012-11-04T10:50:09","slug":"a-month-of-math-software-october-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=4594","title":{"rendered":"A Month of Math Software &#8211; October 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome to the October edition of A Month of Math Software where I take a look at everything that is new and updated in the ever evolving world of mathematical software and programming. \u00a0If you&#8217;d like something included in the next edition please <a href=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=4594\">contact me<\/a> via whatever method suits you best.<\/p>\n<p><strong>GPU accelerated mathematics<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In the old days Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) were only used to make computer games look pretty.\u00a0 These days they can do mathematics <strong>very<\/strong> quickly.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A new, free linear algebra library for OpenCL has been released, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.raijincl.org\/\">RaijinCL<\/a>. \u00a0Brought to you by <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/codedivine\">@codedevine<\/a> (author of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=3079\">RGBench for android<\/a> among other things) what makes this library different is that it is an auto-tuning library that works on lots of different hardware. \u00a0Instead of providing a single optimized implementation of kernels, it generates many different kernels, tests it on the user&#8217;s machine and records the best performing kernel. \u00a0It currently only has matrix-matrix multiplication but Rahul has lots of plans for the future.<\/li>\n<li>The OpenCL version of MAGMA has seen a major update. \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/icl.cs.utk.edu\/magma\/news\/news.html?id=303\">Version 1.0 of clMAGMA<\/a> contains lots of new linear algebra routines.<\/li>\n<li>After many release candidates, the production release of <a href=\"https:\/\/developer.nvidia.com\/cuda-toolkit\">version 5 of NVIDIA&#8217;s CUDA Toolkit<\/a> was made available this month.\u00a0 The toolkit is the fundamental piece of software you need if you intend to devlop GPU accelerated applications on NVIDIA hardware. Mathematical updates include a couple of new basic statistical functions (normcdf and normcdfinv) in the <a href=\"https:\/\/developer.nvidia.com\/cuda-math-library\">CUDA math library<\/a>, incomplete factorization preconditioners (ilu0 and ic0) in the <a href=\"https:\/\/developer.nvidia.com\/cuSPARSE\">CUDA Sparse Matrix library<\/a> and the ability to generate Poisson distributed random numbers in the<a href=\"https:\/\/developer.nvidia.com\/cuRAND\"> CUDA random number generation library<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.accelereyes.com\/\">Jacket<\/a> from Accelereyes is a GPU accelerated toolbox for MATLAB and has been updated to verion 2.3.\u00a0 See the <a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.accelereyes.com\/wiki\/index.php\/Release_Notes\">release notes for more details<\/a>.\u00a0 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=4062\">I played with an older version of Jacket earlier this year<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.culatools.com\/downloads\/dense\/\">CULA Dense<\/a> is a GPU accelerated linear algebra library for NVIDIA CPUs.\u00a0 Version 16 was released in October and the release notes are available at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.culatools.com\/files\/docs\/R16\/release_notes_R16.txt\">http:\/\/www.culatools.com\/files\/docs\/R16\/release_notes_R16.txt<\/a>.\u00a0 The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.culatools.com\/files\/docs\/S4\/release_notes_sparse_S4.txt\">CULA sparse library<\/a> has also been updated (to version 4) but the only new stuff appears to be support for new hardware and CUDA version 5.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Plotting<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.originlab.com\/\">Origin and OriginPro<\/a> have both been upgraded to version 9. \u00a0These commercial plotting packages for Windows are very popular and easy to use (My university has a site license for them and they are used a lot) and this major new release includes <a href=\"http:\/\/www.originlab.com\/index.aspx?go=Products\/Origin&amp;PID=1962\">lots of new functionality<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>DISLIN, a scientific plotting library for multiple languages, is now at version 10.2.5 with the new stuff discussed at\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mps.mpg.de\/dislin\/news.html\">http:\/\/www.mps.mpg.de\/dislin\/news.html<\/a><\/li>\n<li>A new release candidate of matplotlib is now available at\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/matplotlib\/matplotlib\/downloads\">https:\/\/github.com\/matplotlib\/matplotlib\/downloads<\/a>. \u00a0New features include\u00a0PGF\/TikZ backend for easier LaTeX integration and picklable figures. \u00a0The plots below were created using the new release candidate and come to you courtesy of <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/dmcdougall_\">@dmcdougall_<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/matplotlib\/matplotlib\/downloads\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/images\/random\/matplotlib_oct12.png\" alt=\"matplotlib\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n<strong>Free Statistics<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A new maintenance release of R is now available.\u00a0 See what&#8217;s new in version 2.15.2 at <a href=\"https:\/\/stat.ethz.ch\/pipermail\/r-announce\/2012\/000557.html\">https:\/\/stat.ethz.ch\/pipermail\/r-announce\/2012\/000557.html<\/a><\/li>\n<li>The fantastic GUI\/IDE for R, R Studio, has been updated to version 0.97.\u00a0 See the <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.rstudio.org\/2012\/11\/01\/new-version-of-rstudio-v0-97\/\">RStudio blog for the new goodness<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/rkward.sourceforge.net\/\">RKWard<\/a> is another GUI\/IDE for R that&#8217;s been around for over a decade.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve never used it but it must have a lot going for it because there is a large community of users.\u00a0 It was updated to version 0.6 in October and you can see <a href=\"http:\/\/sourceforge.net\/apps\/mediawiki\/rkward\/index.php?title=News#RKWard_0.6.0_is_available_-_also_on_the_Mac\">what&#8217;s new here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Misc<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Stefan Kottwitz&#8217;s TeXblog has a <a href=\"http:\/\/texblog.net\/latex-archive\/news\/tex-news-10-2012\/\">round-up of recent news<\/a> in the TeX and LaTeX typesetting community.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/magma.maths.usyd.edu.au\/magma\/releasenotes\/2\/18\/11\/\">Version 2.18-11<\/a> of Magma has been released. Magama is a commercial computer algebra system designed for computations in algebra, number theory, algebraic geometry and algebraic combinatorics.<\/li>\n<li>The free <a href=\"http:\/\/euler.rene-grothmann.de\/index.html\">Euler math toolbox<\/a> is now at version 19.2&#8211;<a href=\"http:\/\/euler.rene-grothmann.de\/Programs\/XX%20-%20Changes.html\">the changelog has the details<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div><strong>Follow<\/strong><\/div>\n<div>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/walkingrandomly\">WalkingRandomly on Twitter<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/Walkingrandomly\">WalkingRandomly on Facebook<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/plus.google.com\/108930714356162091073\/posts\">WalkingRandomly on Google+<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; line-height: normal;\"><br \/>\n<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome to the October edition of A Month of Math Software where I take a look at everything that is new and updated in the ever evolving world of mathematical software and programming. \u00a0If you&#8217;d like something included in the next edition please contact me via whatever method suits you best. GPU accelerated mathematics In [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-month-of-math-software"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-1c6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4594"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4669,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4594\/revisions\/4669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}