Welcome to NAGNews

Issue 49, 27 October 2005

In this issue:

• Top Story - IRIS Explorer Finalist in Readers’ Choice Awards
• Industry News - NAG routines add new dimension to Simfit software
• Product News - Extensive new functionality in next NAG C Library mark
• General Information - “An introduction to the Quality of Computed Solutions”
• Tips & Hints - NAG Fortran DLLs
• Events - Seattle & London
• Product News - New Implementations

NAG’s visualization software, IRIS Explorer has achieved finalist status in Scientific Computing & Instrumentation’s Readers’ Choice Awards. IRIS Explorer is NAG’s powerful tool for developing customized visualization applications. Its visual programming environment enables you to develop, prototype and build these applications quickly and easily. IRIS Explorer, with its broad range of visualization techniques, from simple graphs to multidimensional animation, enables you to readily discern trends and relationships in your data. To read what SC&I wrote about IRIS Explorer visit www.scamag.com/

IRIS Explorer is a standards-based package that utilizes the Open Inventor™, ImageVision™ and OpenGL™ libraries, together with components from NAG’s world-class numerical libraries. It is available on a broad range of Windows PC, Unix and Linux platforms. For more information on IRIS Explorer click here http://www.nag.co.uk/Welcome_IEC.asp or email us at nagnews@nag.co.uk

The academic version of Simfit is a free Windows package for simulation, curve fitting, statistical analysis and graph plotting developed by Bill Bardsley, University of Manchester, UK. It employs mathematical models from a compiled library, or from user-supplied equations, and can be used in many fields of study such as biology and psychology, and areas of work such as growth curves, factor analysis, power as a function of sample size, dose response curves, and pharmacokinetics.

At present, the NAG Library edition of Simfit uses nearly 200 numerical algorithms from NAG, and is currently being extensively enlarged in the computational areas of optimization, differential equations, curve fitting and statistics. The DLL implementation of the NAG Fortran Library is the source of the NAG algorithms used by Simfit as opposed to the public domain code used by the academic version, and this is permitting a rapid extension of Simfit functionality.

To read the entire article click here http://www.nag.co.uk/educationuk/simfit.asp. For more information on Simfit please visit http://www.simfit.man.ac.uk/default.htm

Extensive new functionality has been added to the forthcoming release of the NAG C Library. The immeninent new release will provide programmers with over 1000 easily embedded numerical routines. The new developments at Mark 8 will make it far and away the largest commercially available numerical library for the C language. In addition to the considerable new functionality, Mark 8 will be available for 64-bit and 32-bit applications alike and feature compatibility with the latest compilers.

More information about this major new release will feature in the next edition of NAGNews in December, however if you are interested in more information please email us at nagnews@nag.co.uk with any questions.

“Accuracy and Reliability in Scientific Computing” is a book edited by Bo Einarsson and published in August 2005 by the Society of Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Sven Hammarling, Principal Consultant at NAG contributed to the book by writing ‘An Introduction to the Quality of Computed Solutions’.

An introduction is given to ideas that are important in understanding and measuring the quality of computed solutions. In particular, the ideas of condition, stability and error analysis, and their realisation in numerical software are reviewed.

To read the introduction please click here http://www.nag.co.uk/IndustryArticles/intro-qual.pdf [pdf]. More information on the publication “Accuracy and Reliability in Scientific Computing” can be found here http://ec-securehost.com/SIAM/SE18.html

Users of the NAG Fortran DLLs will know from the supporting documentation and examples that it is perfectly possible to call the NAG routines from Excel. To help with this NAG supplies a set of ‘Declare’ statements which may be copied and pasted into your VBA module.

Typically there are a number of utilities that you might need to write or copy from the NAG examples in order to complete the necessary code. If you have access to the NAG statistical Add-Ins then these functions need not be replicated, simply reference the NAG_Library.xla supplied with the NAG Statistical Add-Ins. To do this obtain the VBA window in Excel from the Tools\Macro\Visual Basic Editor menus. In this Visual Basic Window use the Tools\References menus to establish a reference to NAG_Library.xla.

The following functions may be useful:

Public Sub AddNagMenu(NagSubMenu As String)
  ' Adds a submenu to the NAG Menu

Sub Assemble(X, A)
  ' Take an argument X and ReDim a VB array A, copying the values
  ' contained in X into A. The first element of A may then be 
  ' passed to NAG routines as an actual argument.

Sub AssembleS(X, V)
  ' Take an argument X and ReDim a VB array vector V, copying the 
  ' values contained in X into V. The first element of V may then 
  ' be passed to NAG routines as an actual argument.

Public Function ContextID(RoutineName As String) As Long
  ' Returns the ContextID for a NAG routine in the Help system

Public Sub DeleteNagMenu(NagSubMenu As String)
  ' Removes a submenu from the NAG menu

Private Function dimension(myVariantArray) As Long
  ' Determines the number of dimensions of an array usually 
  ' determining whether an array has two or one dimension.

For information on NAG’s DLLs please visit http://www.nag.co.uk/numeric/NAGFortranDLLs.asp

• Quant Congress Europe: October 31st - November 1st, 2005, London
  NAG is delighted to be co-sponsoring the Quant Congress Europe event being held in London on 31st October to the 1st November. We will be available to discuss how NAG’s mathematical and statistical components can benefit those working in the finance industry.
  
  Quant Congress Europe is an exciting forum where senior executives and high level academics examine the latest cutting edge issues across the quantitative analysis, trading, risk management and investment markets or more information on how NAG’s software can enhance your financial applications please visit the Finance area of our site http://www.nag.co.uk/main_finance.asp. For further information on the event, visit: http://www.incisive-events.com/quanteurope/.
  

• SC|05 November 15-17, 2005, Seattle
  NAG will be exhibiting at the world’s largest international conference on high performance computing from 15th - 17th November 2005. Under the theme “Gateway to Discovery”, SC|05 will showcase how high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis leads to advances in research, education and commerce. Visit us at booth 1941.
  
  For more information on this prestigious event please visit the event website at http://sc05.supercomputing.org/

NAG is committed to offering new implementations of its broad range of numerical and statistical software, compilers and tools. Since the last edition of NAGNews platform availability has increased for the NAG Fortran Library and the NAG Fortran 90 Library.

The NAG Fortran Library, Mark 21 is now also available for the following platforms:

• AMD-64 Linux64 using the NAGWare f95, the g77 v3.3.3 and the pgf77/pgf90 v 5.2 Compilers
• AMD-64 Solaris 64-bit using the Sun f95 v8.1 Compiler
• HP PA-RISC 1.1 or 2.0 HP-UX using the HP f90 v2.8 Compiler
• Intel EM64T Linux64 using the Intel Fortran v 8.1 Compiler
• IBM Power 4+ AIX 32-bit using the NAGWare f95 Compiler

The NAG Fortran 90 Library, Release 4 is now also available for the following platforms:

• IBM Power 4+ AIX 32-bit using the xlf90 v 9.1 Compiler
• IBM Power 4+ AIX 64-bit using the xlf90 v 9.1 Compiler

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