Welcome to NAGNews

Issue 78, 19 February 2009

Featuring

• Flying Through the Heart
• NAG and ‘Design for Reliability’ with Inference for .NET
• Atmospheric Chemistry on the Web
• NAG Toolbox for MATLAB: Demo Scripts Now Available
• Supercomputing: How to stand out in the supercomputing crowd
• Ask the expert! NAG Fortran Builder
• Out & About with NAG

Scientists at Oxford University are building computer models of the heart to improve the diagnosis and treatment of cardiac disease. Experimental data forms part of the input to the models, and visualization of this data is required in order to better understand its structure. The article “Flying Through the Heart” describes how the visualization was performed by Jeremy Walton, NAG Senior Technical Consultant as part of a project at the Oxford e-Research Centre.

One of the major benefits of the NAG Library is its inherent accuracy and reliability. This coupled with its flexibility makes the use of the library in engineering common-place and well documented (http://www.nag.co.uk/Market/casestudies.asp). Many of the algorithms in the library are well suited for use in Design for Reliability (DFR), an emerging discipline in the field of reliability engineering that employs data analysis tools and processes for designing reliability into products.

The use of the NAG C Library in the creation of data analysis tools for DFR is highlighted in the White Paper “Quality by Design Scenario – Survival/Failure/Reliability Analysis” written by experts at Blue Reference. They’ve developed Inference for .NET, a software add-in for Microsoft Word and Excel. Inference for .NET enables engineers to embed Word or Excel documents with code from the NAG C Library, dynamic scripting commands (IronPython and IronRuby), and structured data – essentially transforming a standard document into a sophisticated data analysis tool.

The E-AIM model (http://www.aim.env.uea.ac.uk/aim/aim.php) is a Fortran atmospheric chemistry model with a web interface which has been used for over a decade by researchers and students who carry out ~13,000 individual calculations annually. The primary application of the model is the chemical thermodynamics of atmospheric particles related to air quality and climate science, both of which are recognised as important environmental problems. NAG software has been a key part of the model from its inception, and in this article we outline how we have benefited from collaboration with NAG. We have found that the usage and impact of our model have been greatly increased by its availability on the web – a feature that is relatively easy to implement – and we provide a simple example showing how to do this, and guidance that may be valuable to Fortran programmers and NAG customers in many fields.

To read ‘Atmospheric Chemistry on the Web’, written by Professor Simon L. Clegg, University of East Anglia and Professor Anthony S. Wexler, University of California at Davis visit http://www.nag.co.uk/IndustryArticles/Atmospheric_Chemistry_on_the_Web.pdf

The articles on the NAG website describing the NAG Toolbox for MATLAB (which can be found here, here and here ) contain code examples which illustrate how to call some NAG Library routines from within MATLAB. The examples have been extracted from demo scripts, and will not necessarily work properly if cut and pasted into MATLAB. Following requests from users, the articles have now been updated to incorporate links to full versions of these scripts, which are available in this archive

If you deploy the same high-performance computing systems as everyone else, how can you possibly gain an edge over your rivals, asks supercomputing expert Andrew Jones.

For many organisations, HPC is a strategic activity. If you can optimise how HPC is used in your organisation then your computation — and thus your design, testing and logistics — will be done faster, or better, or more cost effectively. That optimisation creates a business edge over the competition.

So the value of HPC is allied to a need to differentiate, to step outside the norm enough to get your business ahead of the competition.

Read the full article by Andrew Jones, Vice-President HPC Business at NAG

Question: “When using NAG Fortran Builder to compile and link my program, I see messages from the compiler and linker telling me the results of the compilation, on the “Compile” tab at the bottom of the GUI. Is there any way to see what commands were issued by Fortran Builder to the NAG compiler so that I can see exactly how the program is linked, and perhaps use the same commands in a DOS window?”

Answer: “Yes there is. Go to the Fortran Builder menu bar and click on the “View” button. One of the items on the list is “Previous Build Message”. When you select that, a new window should open. If you then choose “Rebuild” from the “Project” menu, all compile and link commands will be echoed into the "Previous Build Message" window, along with any error messages associated with the build. If you have a DOS window open, with your environment set up correctly, you can cut and paste commands from the “Previous Build Message” window to the DOS window.”

Answered by Mick Pont, Principal Technical Consultant at NAG

If you'd like to talk to us about a NAG event or the possibility of hosting a NAG Seminar at your organisation email us at nagnews@nag.co.uk for more information.

∗ SIAM Conference on ‘CSE’ 2009
2-6 March 2009 – Miami
NAG experts will be attending SIAM's ‘Computational Science & Engineering’ conference. SIAM is holding the conference to “draw attention to the tremendous range of major computational efforts on large problems in science and engineering, to promote the interdisciplinary culture required to meet these large-scale challenges, and to encourage the training of the next generation of computational scientists.”

NAG is attending the conference as an official provider of CSE to the UK's national supercomputer ‘HECToR’.

∗ Oil & Gas HPC Workshop
March 5th - Rice University, Houston
Andrew Jones, Vice-President HPC Business is presenting “What does Performance mean in HPC?” at this event. For further information visit the organiser's website.

∗ DevWeek 2009
23-27 March 2009 – London
NAG experts will be attending this landmark conference/exhibition aimed at software developers, database professionals and IT architects. The conference focuses on a wide range of topics, including .NET Framework 4.0, Silverlight 2, WCF 4.0, Visual Studio 2010, RESTful services, Windows Workflow, ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, SQL Server 2008, LINQ, C# 3, .NET Patterns, Ruby, and more.

∗ HECToR (High End Computing Terascale Resource) Training Courses
Presented by the NAG HECToR Team
A full list of forthcoming HECToR Training Courses can be viewed on the official HECToR website here.

For more information on any of the above events visit NAG's ‘Out & About’ webpage

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