HMC Mathematics Computing Weblog

CIS will be taking odin.ac.hmc.edu down for maintenance on Tuesday, 2006 August 1, between 10:00 AM and 11:00 AM. During this period, MATLAB sessions will not be available, as odin is the license server for the research MATLAB license.

CIS has updated its license servers, so I have finally been able to install MATLAB R2006a (released in January of 2006) on our system.

The R2006a releases includes a number of bug fixes and inaugurates a new naming scheme for releases. For detailed information about what's changed in this version, see the release notes on the MathWorks site.

Testing R2006a

At the moment, I have installed R2006a for testing. You can run it by typing

/shared/local/matlab-testing/bin/matlab

at a shell prompt. The default version is the research license. If you want to try the classroom license, substitute matlab-classroom-testing for matlab-testing in the above command line.

Running the Test Version All the Time

From now on, I expect that we will be maintaining links to a "testing" version of MATLAB at all times. When a newer version is not available, the links will simply point to the current release.

If you want to run the most "cutting edge" version of MATLAB that we have available, you can add one of the testing paths to your PATH environment variable. I recommend that you put the testing path near the head of your PATH so that it isn't overridden by the older version that is set automatically by our shell defaults.

The correct magic incantations to add these paths are

• For csh and variants: % setenv PATH /shared/local/matlab-testing/bin:$PATH
• For Bourne shell variants: set PATH="/shared/local/matlab-testing/bin:$PATH"; export PATH
• For bash, zsh, and newer shells, you may be able to do export PATH="/shared/local/matlab-testing/bin:$PATH"

Our Schedule

I expect to switch our primary MATLAB version to R2006a at the end of next week (July 28). At that time, the links for running MATLAB from /shared/local/bin will be switched to point to the new release.

The old release will remain available until sometime in the fall, assuming that it's still supported by CIS's license servers and that we don't have disk space issues with the /shared/local partition that can be addressed by cleaning up old installations.

Upcoming Releases

The MathWorks is currently making a prerelease of R2006b available for testing, with a final release in early fall. I will probably install that version shortly after we switch to R2006a, and redirect the testing links to point to R2006b.

I have installed version 110.59 of Standard ML of New Jersey, a functional programming language compiler (and interpreter-like environment).

Standard ML is a

safe, modular, strict, functional, polymorphic programming language with compile-time type checking and type inference, garbage collection, exception handling, immutable data types and updatable references, abstract data types, and parametric modules. It has efficient implementations and a formal definition with a proof of soundness.

SML is popular with computer scientists who are interested in programming languages. It is also used in several CS courses at Mudd, and as part of research projects by faculty and students.

To run Standard ML, use the sml command. Additional programs that are part of the Standard ML distribution are installed in /shared/local/sml/bin.

I am pleased to announce the availability of Mathematica 5.2 on the mathematics department's Linux systems!

Mathematica is installed in /shared/local/mathematica and should be available to any Linux user by simply typing

• math For the Mathematica kernel (command-line version)
• mathematica For the GUI version

Mathematica also includes a mcc program that allows you to compile C programs that integrate with Mathematica. Because MATLAB also supplies a mcc command (that runs the MATLAB compiler), the link to Mathematica's mcc is called mathematica-mcc.

Please note that sound on Linux is not supported in the current version of Mathematica. I know, they know, please don't report sound problem to me.

I am in the process of putting together installers for the department's Windows and Mac clients.

Students interested in running Mathematica should contact CIS for details or check back on our Mathematica support page for more details in the near future.

Faculty who wish to run Mathematica at home should also consult that page for details.