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Free Scientific Software for Developing World?
FlashBoltzmann asks: "I'm a physics student in the US working with a group
of physicists, mostly from Africa, who are interested in helping their colleagues on the continent obtain free software for
scientific and educational use. Often, many science
departments in Africa have little or almost nonexistent
funding to purchase new software packages, especially for
scientific research or education. Some know of the free
software available but say it takes up large amounts of time
over often slow internet connections to find and obtain it. I am asking for any recommendations on freeware or open source software, for any operating system, that anyone knows about. We are looking at the Debian version of Linux for a lot of the great software
that comes with it but resources for MS Windows would be
helpful as well."
"Free educational software of any level is appreciated though we prefer college and graduate level software. Also, field specific software is great, e.g. software for condensed matter physics. Eventually we'll probably combine the software on CDs to be distributed to these scientists. Any help is appreciated especially with programs that perform simulations, mathematical and statistical analysis and plotting, compilers, lab software, etc. The users of the software will most likely be physicists or mathematicians."
...is TeX.
This typesetting program was originally aimed at the scientist. I don't know of any other software that produces nicer documents.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Was Are you ready for Calc III. This, and alot more math software can be had from the UofA Math Software Page.
Well there's always this.
/. running a story about NASA donating some stuff to this site...
I recall
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
I worked for a little while in a government research library, and about half the people in the building were both scientists and programmers. They developed a lot of their own tools, and most of them were coding for some *nix, many on Linux.
They didn't care about other people getting their code. I would expect universities to be the same way.
As for bandwidth, that's much less of a problem now with CD burners. I'm assuming your Third World people have CD-ROMs, but given that, if you can talk to some First World scientists & get them to burn and ship, it might well be cheaper.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
SAL is a good resource for finding science apps that run on Linux. Worldwide mirrors, many apps are free.
This is most likely the most complete site out there when it comes to science on linux. http://sal.kachinatech.com/
The standard resource for free scientific software (unfortunately mostly written in Fortran) is Jack Dongarra's netlib: http://www.netlib.org/
It's best in linear algebra (matrix problems etc) but there's other good stuff in there - FFT routines, statistical stuff, some deep mathematics, and more... Also, not free, but good, is the standby Numerical Recipes book, which includes source code for a large variety of uses, particularly solution of nonlinear optimization problems.
Other stuff is available free from the supercomputer centers - at least they used to give stuff away free, though NCSA at least seems to have tried to make money off their things lately...
Energy: time to change the picture.
It is actually not that easy to find free physics software.
For professional astronomy software, I recommend http://star-www.rl.ac.uk/
Some nice but steep stats software in the R project http://www.r-project.org/
And you can use Octave & gnuplot for basic maths. (admittedly not as good as mathematica,matlab or some other maths package.)
This URL http://www.seul.org/sci/seul-sci10.html has a review of linux & GPL packages that are useful to scientists.
It is also probably worth asking some of the software vendors if they would like to donate something, as really, you never know! (if the cause is good...)
Good luck!
fz
yours ever, fz.
Developed at CERN
Great for graphical representation, and statistics. Released under GPL.
I remember using it about three years ago under Red Hat for reconstruting cosmic ray showers. Can't see any possible problems with Debian...
It was great for what I was doing.
Matt.
GAP is a powerful software system for computational abstract algebra and discrete mathematics, especially group theory. See http://www.gap-system.org for details (including mirrors) and download. It's distributed under a "copyleft" not too different from the GPL.
If you want to use GAP for research or teaching and can't download it (we've had people whose bandwidth is too low, and people whose countries do not allow arbitrary internet downloads for political/religious reasons) let us know (mail one of the addresses on the Web site) and we can usually manage to send a CD.
Steve Linton
They have a scientific/engineering Visualization section that has a lot of cool stuff. Here are some examples:
i nk auf/ipc/ipc_d.html
/
;P
K-3D modeling, rendering and animation software (Win32 as well):
http://midas.psi.ch/
Isotopic Pattern Calculator (Link may be wrapped):
http://www.uni-duesseldorf.de/MathNat/pc1-AK_We
MayaVi (Visualization Software):
http://mayavi.sourceforge.net/
MIDAS (Data acq software for particle physics):
http://midas.psi.ch/
GraphThing (Graph Theory tool):
http://members.optushome.com.au/davidsymonds/gt
GNU TeXmacs (Technical writing tool, great for technical docs with formuli):
http://www.texmacs.org/
There are 130 projects on Freshmeat, which is probably just the "tip of the iceberg".
I am not a troll.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
- VTKis a very good package for scientific visualization.
- Maxima is a Free computer algebra system, a bit like Mathematica. It can solve equations, do calculus, plot things, produce TeX output of what you've done, and lots more. Incredibly useful for long tedious bits of algebra.
- gnuplot is a versatile graphing package (2D and 3D, but maxima or VTK are IMO better for 3d stuff). As well as graphing, it can try to fit arbitrary functions to your experimental data.
- LaTeX -- it's very hard indeed to typeset equations better than LaTeX can.
If you're interested in condensed matter physics (or a few other areas), then you should have a look at the Los Alamos E-print server, which contains preprints of a lot of scientific papers.since i installed my student version of Matlab at home, i have used less my Octave. Matlab also can be bought at academic prices, which are still too expensive for cash-strapped academia.
as for linux vs. windows, if you have to leave you computer on for 10 days for a simulation, then linux stability is a nice bonus...
I found these links for linux scientific freeware on this page http://www.freepatents.org/liberty/logiciels.html
.....sorry for the lack of form....and i didn't check all the links.... hope its useful...
o me.html :8000/u/magma/ h tml
Its in French... but then again the majority of my African friends speak it.... there is a lot in there
Sciences et ingénierie
Scientific Applications on Linux http://SAL.KachinaTech.COM/
Index très complet d'applications scientifiques et professionnelles (gratuites, shareware ou commerciales) qui tournent sous Linux.
Statistiques
fiasco http://www.fsf.org/software/fiasco/index.html
xldlas http://a42.com/~thor/xldlas/
MacAnova http://www.stat.umn.edu/~gary/macanova/macanova.h
R http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/R/contents.html
Calcul formel
MuPAD http://www.mupad.de
Maple http://www.maplesoft.com/
Mathematica http://www.wolfram.com/
Macsyma http://www.macsyma.com/
Magma http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au
Macaulay2 http://www.math.uiuc.edu/Macaulay2/
Singular http://www.mathematik.uni-kl.de/~zca/Singular/
Analyse numérique
Scilab http://www-rocq.inria.fr/scilab/
Matlab http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/mlover.s
Octave http://www.che.wisc.edu/octave/
yes, MS sells campus licenses at EXTREME discounts (like $20 for Office and less for the OSs), but the hardware requirements are heavier.
most people in academia are not swimming in cash, so this means old hardware, and an array of diverse machines connected to a server. linux is the ideal software partner for a small research group, in my opinion.
the other factor, as somebody else pointed above, is that GNU or public tools are used by almost everybody. most papers are swapped in
still, the crucial factor that made me wipe out windows for linux was stability. when you do not have a double Xeon crunching numbers, you appreciate the fact that linux will not crash during the 3 days it must be ON.
Take al ook at mupad
It's some sort of mathematica lookalike, superior in some cases and they have free versions.
It's been a while since I used it, but it was great.
http://iraf.noao.edu/iraf-homepage.html is the standard data processing package in American/British astronomy (and possibly Europe too these days). I just noticed it is packaged inside Debian...
Although aimed at astronomy, it would be useful general image processing (particularly good at automating procedures over many images).
http://www.acooke.org
One of the issues I've often run up against when doing scientific programming is the desire for a *real* programming language to support the number crunching. This often caused huge frustration for me when I used Matlab and IDL. One of the nicest solutions I've found for numerical programming is the Numerical Python package. (http://www.pfdubois.com/numpy/ ) You get the numerical expressiveness of Matlab or IDL with the power of Python as a programming language for the half of your program that *doesn't* deal with crunching numbers. (In my experience it's actually usually more than half, even in heavily numeric code!)
Here are a few more links:
The Python website: http://www.python.org
The Scientific Python Project: http://www.scipy.org
Cheers,
-DA