Math. 655, Fall, 2006 Computing Equipment

http://interval.louisiana.edu/courses/655/655_fall_2006_equip.html

Mathematics 655 Computing Equipment and Software

I recommend students use their personal machines, if they have an up-to-date operating system and at least 512 megabytes of memory. The following software will be extremely useful for this course:

Matlab: An up-to-date version of Matlab, with many toolboxes (including the ones of most use to us) is available to all students and faculty through a university-wide site license. The only catch is that you need to be connected to the internet to access the university's license server for this to work. See me if you wish to install this version of Matlab on your personal machine.
INTLAB: A free Matlab toolbox for interval arithmetic, available from Siegfried Rump's group, at http://www.ti3.tu-harburg.de/~rump/intlab/
MiKTeX and WinEdt: MiKTeX is the most complete and well-designed MS-Windows-based system for the TeX typesetting system of which I am aware; furthermore, it is available for free. WinEdt is a shareware editor (costing something like $40 for individuals); when WinEdt is installed, it automatically configures itself to work nicely with MiKTeX, provided MiKTeX has already been installed. TeX (and in particular, plain LaTeX) are presently important to know, since they are by far the most common tools used by major mathematics and computer science journal publishers and by the authors who publish in those journals.
The NEOS server: The NEOS server is a an internet-based server to which users submit optimization problems through a web interface; computers associated with Argonne Labs then do the computations, and the results are returned in a web page and via email. Students will need to learn the basics of certain modelling languages (such as GAMS, AMPL, and MPS) for describing the optimization problems to be submitted to NEOS. Particular solvers available through the NEOS interface of interest to us will be icos and BARON.

I also point out that, among the machines available to faculty and graduate students in MDD 401 are a state-of-the-art MS-Windows-based machine and a state-of-the-art Linux-based machine. These are both dual-processor machines with up-to-date software. The linux-based machine is cauchy.louisiana.edu, and is available both at the console and by remote login.