A month of math software – December 2011

December 30th, 2011 | Categories: math software, Month of Math Software | Tags:

Welcome to the final Month of Math Software for 2011.  Lots of people sent in news items this month so hopefully there will be something of interest to everyone.  If you have any news items or articles that you think will fit in to next month’s edition then please contact me and tell me all about it.

If you like what you see and want more then check out the archives.

Mathematica StackExchange Proposal

There is a proposal to launch a new Mathematica-specific questions/answers site on StackExchange.  All it needs is enough interested people who will follow or commit to the proposal. There is already a vibrant Mathematica community on StackOverflow, where many of the MathGroup regulars participate.  Unfortunately not all questions are on topic or tolerated there, so many believe that it would be better to launch a new site.  If you are willing to lend support to this proposal then add your name to the list at  http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/37304/mathematica?referrer=23yK9sXkBPQIDM_9uBjtlA2

General mathematical software

Making MATLAB faster

More mathematics in CUDA

  • Release candidate 2 of version 4.1 of NVIDIA’s CUDA Toolkit has been released.  There’s lots of interesting new mathmatical functions and enhancements over version 4.0 including Bessel functions, a new cuSPARSE tri-diagonal solver, new random number generators (MRG32k3a and MTGP11213 Mersenne Twister), and one thousand image processing functions!

Differential Equations

  • FEniCS 1.0 has been released.  The FEniCS Project is a collection of free software with an extensive list of features for automated, efficient solution of differential equations.
  • Fenics mesh

Libraries

  • The HSL Mathematical Software Library (http://www.hsl.rl.ac.uk) is a high performance Fortran library that specialises in sparse linear algebra and is widely used by engineering and optimization communities. Since the release of HSL 2011 at the start of Feburary, there have been a number of updates to the library.  Take a look at http://www.hsl.rl.ac.uk/changes.html for the detailed list of changes.  Interestingly, this library is free for academic use!
  • FLINT (Fast Library for Number Theory) version 2.3alpha has been released.  I can’t find any info on what’s new at the moment.
  • Version 5.1 of AMDs linear algebra library, ACML, is now available.
  • Version 1.6 of the AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing Math Libraries (APPML) has been released.  I’m not sure what’s new since the release notes only contain information about Timeout Detection and Recovery rather than info on the new stuff.  AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing Math Libraries are software libraries containing FFT and BLAS functions written in OpenCL and designed to run on AMD GPUs. The libraries also support running on CPU devices to facilitate debugging and multicore programming.
  • Version 2.4.5 of PLASMA (Parallel Linear Algebra for Scalable Multi-core Architectures) was released back in November but I somehow missed it.  Check out the 2.4.5 release notes for details.

Blog posts about Mathematical software

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