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."

Comments

An old math favorite

[imrdkl]

Was Are you ready for Calc III. This, and alot more math software can be had from the UofA Math Software Page.

Try NA/European physicists & mathematicians

[hearingaid]

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.

SAL: Scientific Applications on Linux

[gylle]

SAL is a good resource for finding science apps that run on Linux. Worldwide mirrors, many apps are free.

Netlib and more

[apsmith]

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...

Re:Netlib and more

[Wile E. Heresiarch]

I do quite a bit of number crunching. Here are
some of the resources I use:

Netlib (www.netlib.org) -- Yes, it's mostly Fortran, but that's a good thing! Just use f2c (easy to find) and translate to C if that's what you want. Don't underestimate the power of decades-old programs -- old == widely used and well-tested.

StatLib (lib.stat.cmu.edu) -- Collection of statistical software, in various languages, including C, Fortran, and S.

SAL, Scientific Applications on Linux (sal.kachinatech.com) -- a very large collection of links.

Freshmeat (www.freshmeat.net) -- Not scientifically oriented, but there is much scientific stuff there, along with all kinds of miscellany.

Octave (www.octave.org) -- A package for matrix manipulations, similar to Matlab, but free. Useful for all kinds of problems.

R (www.r-project.org) -- An implementation of the S language for statistics, but also useful for general problems, similar to Octave. S+ is a commercial implementation of S.

Well, that ought to be enough to get started. To echo something other posters have mentioned -- don't even bother with Windows software. If your budget is tight, save your money for hardware, don't waste it on the MS tax.

GAP -- Computational Group Theory and more

[stevelinton]

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

Seriously... check out Freshmeat.net

[eno2001]

They have a scientific/engineering Visualization section that has a lot of cool stuff. Here are some examples:

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_Wei nk auf/ipc/ipc_d.html

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. ;P

Things I use at work...

[doop]

I'm doing a PhD on simulations of soft condensed matter, and mainly use either free software, or stuff we wrote in-house. Off the top of my head:

• 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.

mupad

[platypus]

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.

IRAF for Astronomy/Image Processing

[andrew cooke]

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).