Numerical Software
Most computational problems in engineering can be broken down into
well-known types of calculations like solving linear systems of equations,
fast Fourier transforms, etc. Consequently, frequently you only have
to write a short driver routine for your particular problem.
because software to solve the subtasks is already available. This
way people don't have to reinvent the wheel over and over again.
The best software for a particular type of problem must often
be purchased from a commercial company, but for linear algebra
and some other basic numerical computations there is high-quality
free software available (through Netlib).
Netlib
Netlib (the NET LIBrary) is a large collection of freely
available software, documents, and databases of interest to the
numerical, scientific computing, and other communities. The repository
is maintained by AT&T Bell Laboratories, the University of Tennessee
and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and replicated at several sites
around the world.
Netlib contains high-quality software that has been extensively tested,
but as all free software it comes with no warranty and little (if any)
support. In order to use the software, you first have to download
it to your computer and then you have to compile it yourself.
There are many ways to access Netlib, the most common methods are the
World Wide Web, e-mail, and ftp:
http://www.netlib.org/
e-mail
Send the message:
send index
to
netlib@netlib.org
to receive a contents summary and instructions.
ftp
Anonymous ftp to:
ftp.netlib.org
Two of the most popular packages at Netlib are the BLAS and LAPACK libraries
which we will describe in later sections.
Some commercial Fortran packages
In this section we briefly mention a few of the largest
(commercial) software packages for general numerical computations.
- NAG
- The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG)
has developed a
Fortran library
containing over 1000 user-callable subroutines for solving
general applied math problems, including: ordinary and partial
differential equations,
optimization problems, FFT and other transforms, quadrature, linear algebra,
non-linear equations, integral equations, and more.
- IMSL
- The
IMSL Fortran numerical library is made by
Visual Numerics, Inc.
and covers most of the areas contained in the NAG library.
It also has support for analyzing and presenting statistical data in
scientific and business applications.
- Numerical recipes
- The books Numerical Recipes in C/Fortran are
very popular among engineers because they can be used as a cookbook
where you can find a "recipe" to solve the problem at hand.
However, the corresponding software
Numerical Recipes is in no way (e.g. scope or quality) comparable to
that provided by NAG or IMSL.
It should be mentioned that all the software listed above also comes in
a C version (or is at least callable from C).
[Fortran Tutorial Home]
boman@sccm.stanford.edu