Welcome to NAGNews

Issue 40, 7 October 2004

In this issue:

• Top story - Next generation data mining algorithms now available
• Free Trial - NAG DMC 2.0
• General Information - NAG presents visualization for Climateprediction.net project
• Tips and Hints - Help for Java developers
• Events - Pennsylvania
• Product News - New Implementations

For more information about any of the articles featured in this issue, please do not hesitate to contact us at nagnews@nag.com

NAG is delighted to announce that release 2.0 of the NAG Data Mining & Cleaning Components (DMC 2.0) is now available. The NAG DMC is the first commercially available data mining application development toolkit that uses the results from a three-year European Union funded project, EUREDIT, a collaborative network of more than 300 computer scientists and mathematical experts that work together to solve complex mathematical problems.

Technical improvements at release 2.0 of the NAG DMC include:

1. Enhanced data cleaning to resolve the problems of missing, invalid or incomplete data (data imputation methods)
2. Advances in outlier identification to determine which datasets are suitable for analysis
3. New memory-efficient multivariate statistical methods that have been the traditional core of data mining techniques
4. A wide range of added functionality for machine learning and pattern recognition

NAG DMC 2.0, unlike most other commercially available data mining tools, is designed to be incorporated into the user's application rather than requiring the user to learn a new interface to gain access to additional techniques.

To read more about the NAG DMC 2.0 click here or email us directly with any specific questions.

Are you looking to develop data mining capabilities in your applications? NAG is offering free trials of NAG DMC 2.0, release 2.0. To apply for a trial email us with your details.

Climateprediction.net is a high-profile e-Science research experiment aimed at the accurate modelling of changes in the world's climate over the next fifty years. Thousands of participants all over the world have down loaded the project's climate simulator and are running it using the spare capacity of their desktop PCs. NAG has been involved in climateprediction.net for the past two years and has developed the real-time visualization component of the model, enables users to track the progress of their simulation as cloud cover and temperature changes over the surface of the globe.

The visualization work was presented at the joint Eurographics/IEEE TCVG Visualization Symposium held recently in Konstanz, Germany, and has been published as:

"Visualization For Public-Resource Climate Modelling", by J.P.R.B. Walton, D. Frame and D.A. Stainforth. Data Visualization 2004 (O. Deussen, C. Hansen, D. Keim and D. Saupe, eds.) pp 103-108. Eurographics Association, 2004.

Please contact us if you would like a copy of this paper. To find out more about the project - including how to participate in it - please visit http://www.climateprediction.net. For more information about NAG's visualisation software please go to http://www.nag.co.uk/visualisation_graphics.asp.

The NAG C Library contains many mathematical and statistical routines which are useful for software developers. Areas covered include linear algebra, optimization, quadrature, differential equations, regression analysis, and time series analysis. Although written in C, the functionality of the library can be accessed from other languages, including C++, and on PCs, DLL versions of the library can be exploited in many ways. This ability to make use of the NAG C Library is certainly true for Java also. Please follow the links below for more information and contact us if you have specific computational uses of Java in mind.

For someone needing to perform numerical computations, one approach is to create Java classes implementing the required functionality; a group who have made progress in this direction, partly by writing new code and partly by converting pre-existing code from other languages into Java, is the Numerics Working Group of the Java Grande Forum. The JavaNumerics web page gives much useful information, including discussion of the difficulties of using Java for numerical computation due to constraints imposed by Java as it currently stands.

To read the entire report, please click here. For more detailed information on the NAG C Library please click here.

• SC2004, Pennsylvania
  NAG will be exhibiting at SC2004 in Pennsylvania, USA from 8 November through to 11 November.
  
  "Bridging Communities" is the theme of this year's conference, which brings together representatives from the high performance computing community to exchange ideas, celebrate past successes and plan for the future. NAG experts will be available at stand 906 to talk about the NAG HPC Libraries.
  
  For more information about the event visit the organisers web site at http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2004/.

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 Data Mining Components, the NAG C and Fortran Libraries, the NAGWare f95 Compiler and the NAG Foundation Toolbox.

The NAG DMC 2.0 is now available for the following platforms:

• Intel-32 Windows DLL using the MSV C/C++ v 6.0 Compiler
• Intel-32 Windows Linux using the gcc v 3.2.2 Compiler
• Sun SPARC Solaris using the Workshop 5 C Compiler

The NAG C Library, Mark 7 is now also available for the following platforms:

• Intel-64 Linux64 using the gcc v 3.2.2 Compiler
• Intel-64 Linux64 using the Intel C++ v 8.0 Compiler
• Intel-32 Linux using the gcc v 3.2.2 Compiler

The NAG Fortran Library, Mark 20 is now also available for the following platforms:

• Intel-32 Linux using the Intel v 8.0 Compiler
• Intel-64 Linux64 using the Intel v 8.0 Compiler

The NAGWare f95 Compiler, Release 5.0 is now also available for the following platforms:

• HP PA-RISC 1.1 HP-UX11 using the HP ANSI C Compiler
• Sun SPARC Solaris using the gcc 2.95.2 Compiler
• AMD-64 Linux64 using the gcc 3.2.1/3.3.1 Compiler
• HP Alpha Tru64
• IBM Power AIX using the AIX SL C 3.1.4.0 Compiler

The NAG Foundation Toolbox, Release 1.1 is now also available for the following platform:

• Sun SPARC Solaris MATLAB 6.1, 6.5 or 7

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