Free Scientific Software for Developing World? 212
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."
University of Tokyo Physics (Score:2, Interesting)
We have correspondence programs with several universities in Africa in which we will provide to them our outmoded hardware. It is unfortunate that often, we are not able to replace our hardware as often as we would prefer, but when we do, we attempt to find a physics department without adequate hardware.
Also in the course of completing their theses, graduate students must write various software tools to assist them. The copyright to these tools belongs to the University if I am not mistaken. Although my University does not distribute these freely as some would prefer, they are sometimes provided to the other universities which have the hardware necessary to run them (with the consent of the programmer student of course).
Yes, there is more that may be done, but I believe that we are working to genuinely assist other physics programs which are less fortunate that we are in some respects. Does anyone else know of similar programs?
R. Suzuka
So Internet is too slow to download distros? (Score:2, Interesting)
Some useful free tools (Score:2, Interesting)
The thesis was written in LaTeX, using emacs, and made printer friendly with dvips.
The data plots were done in gnuplot.
The simulations were written in c with gcc or Fortran with g77. For the matrix analysis algorithms I used LAPACK. For minimization routines I used some of the Numerical Recipes routines, which aren't free software exactly, but Numerical Recipes is an easy book to buy used off Amazon.
I know that all of this stuff is really old-skool, but, it all works fine.
windows trap (Score:3, Interesting)
yes, MS sells campus licenses at EXTREME discounts (like $20 for Office and less for the OSs), but the hardware requirements are heavier.
most people in academia are not swimming in cash, so this means old hardware, and an array of diverse machines connected to a server. linux is the ideal software partner for a small research group, in my opinion.
the other factor, as somebody else pointed above, is that GNU or public tools are used by almost everybody. most papers are swapped in
still, the crucial factor that made me wipe out windows for linux was stability. when you do not have a double Xeon crunching numbers, you appreciate the fact that linux will not crash during the 3 days it must be ON.
linux is the answer (Score:2, Interesting)
not only is it a free os, it also provides ALL the core tools you need to do research! for example you have TeX (+ several excellent text editors), the whole gnu compiler suite (and debuggers), excellent plotting tools for data and image manipulation (gnuplot, gimp, xgrace,
there are a lot of other scientific applications you can get for free for linux if you are in an academic environment and which are awesome tools to use for researchers. i have seen many responses already with good pointers to different places (SAL, freshmeat, CERN, IBM Open DX).
finally, once can also make computational clusters with linux -- really inexpensive ones!
Re:bsd ports (Score:1, Interesting)
point is that your correct, in a way... it is MOST easy to do "cd
Re:The one to begin with... (Score:2, Interesting)
Now I've started using it for reports and documents at work (anything to save me from MS word). I started using Lyx at first, but I found I actually liked doing LaTeX by hand better.
I really like Yorick.. (Score:1, Interesting)
arbitrary dimension so you can multiply
a 6 x 4 x 8 matrix by a 4 x 8 x 2 matrix and
end up with a 6x2 matrix (I think). Advantages
are c-like syntax (scilab/matlab are UGLY),
Graphing, and MPI interface. Downside is
that it doesn't have that big a user following.
You can find out more here:
ftp://ftp-icf.llnl.gov/pub/Yorick/doc/index.html.
Or hit up google.
-- cary