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From: | Michael Creel |
Subject: | Re: How does Octave shine? |
Date: | Thu, 21 Sep 2006 09:45:58 +0200 |
User-agent: | Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 (X11/20060728) |
Cameron Laird wrote:
I'm helping put together a presentation on the potential of open-source software in engineering situations; I'd love one or two or three very pointed examples of work Matlab effectively can't do but Octave makeseasy. Although I've used Octave occasionally over the last year, I'm not current or expert with it. What shows Octave off to best advantage for a Matlab-using audience? Is it the ODE or nonlinearalgebraic solver? Variable-length argument- and result-passing? Who's good at Octave advocacy? _______________________________________________
It has already been mentioned, but I'll mention it again, since it gives me an opportunity to plug a project of mine. You can run Octave for free on as many machines as you like. When you're doing clustering, that's important. <plug> I have used Octave on clusters up to 40 machines using ParallelKnoppix. Who knows how much it would cost to do that with Matlab? Boot up PK and set up a 2 node cluster on 2 laptops in 10 minutes, and run some parallel examples for Octave. I've found that this impresses Matlab users.</plug>
The ease of writing or wrapping in C code is also important. Many people have written wrapper functions for C functions for visualization, neural networks, MPI, gsl, ..., the list goes on....
Michael
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