Welcome to NAGNews

Issue 37, 3 June 2004

In this issue:

• Top story - Coming Soon: Release 2 of the Data Mining Components
• NAG in the News - Fortran Matters
• Book Launch - Fortran 95/2003 Explained
• Sales Information - State Licences for Germany
• General Information - NAG Colloquium "Analysing optical instrumentation and measurement networks in Large Scale Metrology"
• Events - Germany/Denmark
• Tips and Hints - The NAG SMP Library
• Product News - New Implementations of NAG Products

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

Release 1 of NAG's Data Mining Components was launched in November 2001 and since that time work has been continuing on the further development of this unique data mining software toolkit. 2004 will see the official launch of Release 2, which will bring significant advances in many data mining areas, and the addition of data cleaning components.

New key features include:

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

The official launch of the NAG Data Mining Components will be featured in a future edition of NAGNews. For more information on the existing version please visit http://www.nag.co.uk/numeric/DR/drdescription.asp or email us at nagnews@nag.com

The nature of today's computing challenges, and the direction in which many commercial and research areas are moving, is taking on more complicated problems that involve far more code. When you add to the complexity of problems, the various languages with numeric computing capabilities do not rise to the tasks at hand equally. For many numerical computational problems, Fortran and C are comparable when it comes to computational speed. However, from the numeric point of view, Fortran is inherently safer for certain operations, as compared with C. Fortran's key focus is on highly dependable numerical facilities. If one is equally familiar with computing in any of these languages, and more or less language-neutral in orientation, one commonly concludes that Fortran is the superior alternative.

The above paragraph of text is the introduction to an article written by Malcolm Cohen, Principal Technical Consultant at NAG, recently published in SDTimes. To read the entire article please visit http://www.nag.co.uk/IndustryArticles/Fortran_Matters_Cohen.pdf

For information on the NAG Fortran Library visit http://www.nag.co.uk/IndustryArticles/Fortran_Matters_Cohen.pdf and NAGWare f95 Compiler visit http://www.nag.co.uk/nagware/np.asp

NAG is delighted to publicise the launch of "Fortran 95/2003 Explained" authored by three leading experts in the development of the language; Malcolm Cohen, Principal Technical Consultant at NAG, Oxford, Michael Metcalf, formerly of the Information Technology Division CERN, Geneva, and John Reid of Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxford.

The book is a complete and authoritative description of the two languages (Fortran 95 and Fortran 2003) and is intended for new and existing users of Fortran, and for all those involved in scientific and numerical computing. It is suitable as a textbook for teaching and, with its extensive index, as a handy reference for practitioners.

"Fortran 95/2003 Explained" is available through all good bookshops or direct from Oxford University Press at: http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-852693-8

NAG is pleased to announce that we have recently renewed and expanded our State Licences (Landeslizenz) for the use of the NAG Numerical Libraries and Compilers throughout Germany.

NAG offers wide coverage for all the NAG Libraries, including the Fortran, C and HPC Libraries, NAG Data Mining Components and the NAGWare f95 Compiler are now available to most Universities in Germany. We are keen to ensure that everyone should know how easy access to our globally renowned products can be.

We do not have space here to list the details of each State Licence in full so please contact us to find out exactly what is covered in your State. For further information please e-mail us on nagnews@nag.com or see us at the forthcoming International Supercomputing Conference in Heidelberg from the 23 - 25 June 2004 (see 'Events' section below for further details).

Large Scale Metrology concerns itself with the 3D measurement of manufactured objects using mainly optical instrumentation. Objects, such as aircraft components, can have dimensions up to 10s of metres with accuracy requirements down to 10s of micrometres. Instrument modelling and measurement procedures are strongly dependent on geometric principles. The talk will look at how instruments are modelled to achieve the measurement accuracy and the analysis methods behind the creation of measurement networks and target coordinates. This will be placed in the context of real systems and applications.

The above abstract has been taken from a presentation entitled 'Analysing optical instrumentation and measurement networks in Large Scale Metrology' given by Dr Stephen Kyle, Senior Engineer Metrology Division, Leica Geosystems that was given at the NAG 2003 Colloquium in December last year. To view the entire article please visit http://www.nag.co.uk/Colloquium/StephenKyle/StephenKyle.htm

• International Supercomputing Conference: 23 - 25 June, Heidelburg
  NAG is looking forward to demonstrating the NAG HPC Libraries at Europe's largest super computing event - SC2004. We will be available to discuss how the NAG SMP Library and the NAG Parallel Library that form the NAG HPC Libraries can enhance the performance of your applications on multi-processor systems.
  
  To find out more about this event and to book your attendance visit the organisers website at http://www.isc2004.org/
  
  
• International Congress on Mathematical Education: 4 - 11 July, Copenhagen
  In July NAG will be exhibiting at The 10th International Congress on Mathematical Education (ICME-10) at The Technical University of Denmark. If you are interested in what is happening in mathematics education worldwide, in terms of research as well as teaching practices and, would like to exchange information on the problems of mathematics education around the world then this congress will be of great benefit to you.
  
  For more event information please visit the organisers website at http://www.icme-10.dk/

Psuedo-Random Numbers
If your application has to generate many random numbers it is more efficient to call a routine that returns an array of pseudo random numbers as this minimises the overhead associated with each call.

SMP/OpenMP Parallel Regions
If your code contains OpenMP directives to create parallel regions, please remember that this will switch off any parallelism in NAG routines called within the parallel region since multi-level SMP parallelism is not (yet) supported by any vendor.

For more information about the NAG SMP Library please click here http://www.nag.co.uk/numeric/fl/FSdescription.asp or email mailto:nagnews@nag.com with any specific enquiries.

NAG is committed to offering new implementations of its broad range of numerical and statistical software components and compilers and tools. Since the last edition of NAGNews platform availability has increased for the NAGWare f95 Compiler.

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

• Intel-32 Windows using the NAGWare Salford/FTN90 Compiler

For more information about the NAG Fortran Library please click here.

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

• AMD-64 Linux64

For more information about the NAGWare f95 Compiler please click here.

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