• 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 need additional information concerning access to Matlab..
• INTLAB:  A free Matlab toolbox for interval arithmetic, available from Siegfried Rump's group, at http://www.ti3.tu-harburg.de/~rump/intlab/
• The GlobSol Software: We will use GlobSol as a benchmarking tool.  Also, depending on students' skills and interest, we will use components of GlobSol for further software development.  However, this will be somewhat more challenging than development in Matlab, and, for us, will be enabled by access to a good installation of a recent gnu compiler suite within a reasonably fast machine running Linux.
  
• 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.
• For typesetting papers: 
• 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.
• TeXMaker.  I recommend texlive and texmaker in Ubuntu environments.
• For a Linux operating system: I recommend Ubuntu 10.4 or higher as a Linux-based operating system.  Reasons I recommend this version of Ubuntu include the easy-to-use package manager that automatically ensures consistency, as well as an up-to-date gnu compiler suite that includes a sufficient number of standard Fortran features for our use.

See also the information on resources.