Browsing by Author "Brewster, Matthew W."
Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item A Comparative Evaluation of Matlab, Octave, FreeMat, and Scilab on Tara(2011) Brewster, Matthew W.; Gobbert, Matthias K.Matlab is the most popular commercial package for numerical computations in mathematics, statistics, the sciences, engineering, and other fields. Octave, FreeMat, and Scilab are free numerical computational packages that have many of the same features as Matlab. They are available to download on the Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. We investigate whether these packages are viable alternatives to Matlab for uses in research and teaching. We compare the results on the cluster tara in the UMBC High Performance Computing Facility with 86 nodes, each with two quadcore Intel Nehalem processors and 24 GB of memory. The tests focused on usability lead us to conclude that the package Octave is the most compatible with Matlab, since it uses the same syntax and has the native capability of running m-files. Both FreeMat and Scilab were hampered by somewhat different syntax or function names and some missing functions. The tests focused on efficiency show that Matlab and Octave are fundamentally able to solve problems of the same size and with equivalent efficiency in absolute times, except in one test dealing with a very large problem. FreeMat and also Scilab exhibit significant limitations on the problem size and the efficiency of the problems they can solve in our tests. In summary, we conclude that Octave is the best viable alternative to Matlab because it was not only fully compatible with Matlab in our tests, but it also performed very well.Item A Comparative Evaluation of Matlab, Octave, FreeMat, Scilab, and R on Tara(2012) Popuri, Sai K.; Raim, Andrew M.; Brewster, Matthew W.; Gobbert, Matthias K.Matlab is the most popular commercial package for numerical computations in mathematics, statistics, the sciences, engineering, and other fields. Octave, FreeMat and Scilab are free numerical computational packages that have many of the same features as Matlab. R is a free Statistical package. Although R does not belong to the same line of products as Matlab, it is similar to Matlab in its computational capabilities. These packages are available to download on the Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. We investigate whether they are viable alternatives to Matlab for uses in research and teaching. We compare the results on the cluster tara in the UMBC High Performance Computing Facility with 86 nodes, each with two quadcore Intel Nehalem processors and 24 GB of memory. The tests focused on usability lead us to conclude that the package Octave is the most compatible with Matlab, since it uses the same syntax and has the native capability of running m-files. Both FreeMat and Scilab were hampered by somewhat different syntax or function names and some missing functions. The tests focused on efficiency show that Matlab and Octave are fundamentally able to solve problems of the same size and with equivalent efficiency in absolute times, except in one test dealing with a very large problem. FreeMat and also Scilab exhibit significant limitations on the problem size and the efficiency of the problems they can solve in our tests. The syntax of R is significantly different from that of Matlab, Octave, FreeMat, and Scilab. R too exhibited certain limitations on the size of problems it could solve for and its performance was similar to that of FreeMat and Scilab. In summary, we conclude that Octave is the best viable alternative to Matlab because it was not only fully compatible (in terms of syntax) with Matlab in our tests, but it also performed very well.Item A Comparative Evaluation of Matlab, Octave, FreeMat, Scilab, R, and IDL on Tara(2012) Coman, Ecaterina; Brewster, Matthew W.; Popuri, Sai K.; Raim, Andrew M.; Gobbert, Matthias K.Matlab is the most popular commercial package for numerical computations in mathematics, statistics, the sciences, engineering, and other fields. IDL, a commercial package used for data analysis, along with the free numerical computational packages Octave, FreeMat, Scilab, and the statistical package R shares many of the same features as Matlab. They are available to download on the Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. We investigate whether these packages are viable alternatives to Matlab for uses in research and teaching. We compare the results on the cluster tara in the UMBC High Performance Computing Facility with 86 nodes, each with two quadcore Intel Nehalem processors and 24 GB of memory. The tests focused on usability lead us to conclude that the package Octave is the most compatible with Matlab, since it uses the same syntax and has the native capability of running m-files. FreeMat, Scilab, R, and IDL were hampered by somewhat different syntax or function names and some missing functions. The tests focused on efficiency show that Matlab and Octave are fundamentally able to solve problems of the same size and with equivalent efficiency in absolute times, except in one test dealing with a very large problem. Also IDL performed equivalently in the case of iterative methods. FreeMat, Scilab, and R exhibit significant limitations on the problem size and the efficiency of the problems they can solve in our tests. The syntax of R and IDL are significantly different from that of Matlab, Octave, FreeMat, and Scilab. In summary, we conclude that Octave is the best viable alternative to Matlab because it was not only fully compatible (in terms of syntax) with Matlab in our tests, but it also performed very well.Item The Influence of Stochastic Parameters on Calcium Waves in a Heart Cell(2013) Brewster, Matthew W.Calcium is a critical component in many cellular functions. It serves many important functions such as signal transduction, contraction of muscles, enzyme function, and maintaining potential difference across excitable membranes. In this study we examine calcium waves in a heart cell and how they diffuse. Calcium sparks are intracellular release events which are important in converting electrical stimuli into mechanical responses. We investigate the effects of a stochastic spatially uniform ux density term as well as of a stochastic spatially varying ux density term. We hypothesize that having a stochastic ux density term is more physiologically accurate. We use an array of statistical techniques as well as parallel computing to facilitate the large number of simulation runs.Item Study of Free Alternative Numerical Computation Packages(Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 2011) Brewster, Matthew W.Matlab is the most popular commercial package for numerical computations in mathematics, statistics, the sciences, engineering, and other fields. Octave, FreeMat, and Scilab are free numerical computational packages that have many of the same features as Matlab. They are available to download on the Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. We investigate whether these packages are viable alternatives to Matlab for uses in teaching and research. We compare the packages under Linux on one compute node with two quad-core Intel Nehalem processors (2.66 GHz, 8 MB cache) and 24 GB of memory that is part of an 86-node distributed-memory cluster. After performing both usability and performance tests on Matlab, Octave, FreeMat, and Scilab, we conclude that Octave is the most usable and most powerful freely available numerical computation package. Both FreeMat and Scilab exhibited some incompatibility with Matlab and some performance problems in our tests. Therefore, we conclude that Octave is the best viable alternative to Matlab because not only was it fully compatible with Matlab, but it also exhibited the best performance. This paper reports on work done while working for the REU Site: Interdisciplinary Program in High Performance Computing at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.