Sage anyone?

[calcpage]

I've been playing with FLOSS (Free Linux Open Source Software) alternatives for some time now.  I have been using for example:

Sage (like Mathematica)
Octave (like MATLAB)
R (like S-Plus).

I wonder if you might want to include Sage in pelicanHPC in the future.  They have a package called dSage for distributed computing that may be of interest to you and your users!  With this package you could set up a grid much like gridMathematica!

Take a look at:
http://www.sagemath.org
http://sagenb.org

I love your clustered approach to Octave!  My students and I are going to have a field day with your CD next year.  I have an independent study class on clusters, but the school year is nearing an end...

Regards,
AJG

[Michael Creel]

There is a lot of great software out there. The idea of PelicanHPC is to be a tool for applied research, and not so much for learning. The CD image is made by running a script, and people who need other software packages can learn to use the script to make their own version with the packages they need. I expect that people who are able to use MPI in their work will be able to use the script without too much trouble.

This is not to say that educational tools aren't needed. For a while, with ParallelKnoppix, I was attempting to provide a tool with more of an educational focus. Now I have reduced the ambition level, to focus on making a productive and flexible research tool.

Sage looks like an interesting package. If it were available for Debian, it would be easy to include it in PelicanHPC. I personally won't be taking that on, though, for the reason noted above.

[Michael Creel]

I have been looking at Sage a bit, and it looks pretty nice. Apparently, you can download a binary and run it from any directory. If this is so, then putting the binary in /home/user on a running PelicanHPC system should work fine. I will check it out and report back.

[calcpage]

OK, I didn't mean to make more work for you - just a suggestion!  I guess I was thinking of those days of parallelKnoppix where I thought you were looking for new packages.  

BTW, I think I used the binary once and a deb another time to install Sage.  I think I found a debian package under http://packages.debian.org but kpackage installs it somewhere weird....  The only reason I mention Sage is because you may find the distributed version, dSage, interesting although there's not much documentation for it.

TIA,
AJG