Because it's more fun than getting there in a straight line.
Part of my role at MathWorks involves supporting academics in the use of their tools. Every now and then I get involved with co-supervising projects which usually involves some element of assessment. Ever since the advent of ChatGPT, I have noticed that students like to delve into topics a lot more than they used to. [ ]
I recently had the opportunity to appear on Jousef Murad s podcast Deep Dive. My appearance was sponsored by my employer, MathWorks, but I was given free reign to talk about pretty much whatever I wanted. So I chose to talk about Research Software Engineering and the techniques from software engineering that I think every scientist [ ]
WalkingRandomly is coming up to its 15th Anniversary! When I started blogging in 2007, I never would have believed that this little corner of the web would still be going in 2022! As you might have noticed, posting frequency has waned over recent years which is partly to do with Real Life taking over somewhat [ ]
The MATLAB community site, MATLAB Central, is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a coding competition where the only aim is to make an interesting image with under 280 characters of code. The 280 character limit ensures that the resulting code is tweetable. There are a couple of things I really like about the format of [ ]
Just over 4 years ago I was very happy with the 1.2 Teraflops of single precision performance I measured on my then-new Dell XPS 95600 laptop using MATLAB s GPU Bench and noted that its performance was on-par with the first supercomputer I supported professionally. Double precision performance stank of course but I had gotten used [ ]
Welcome to the 194th Carnival of Mathematics! I am extremely late in posting this so late in fact that the 195th edition as already been published! 194 has a few interesting properties. According to its wikipedia entry, 194 is an odious number that is also the smallest Markov number that is neither a Fibonacci number nor a Pell number. It s the smallest number that [ ]
Earlier this week Apple announced their new, Arm-based Apple Silicon machines to the world in a slick marketing event that had many of us reaching for our credit cards. Simultaneously, The Numerical Algorithms Group announced that they had ported their Fortran Compiler to the new platform. At the time of writing this is the only Fortran [ ]
At the time of writing, Microsoft Azure has 3 High Performance Computing instances available and I often find myself looking up their specifications and benchmark results when discussing their various methods with colleagues and clients. All the information is out there but seems to be spread across several documents. To save me the trouble in [ ]
When using the Azure Command Line Interface (CLI), it is often necessary to explicitly state which region you want to perform an operation in. For example, when creating a resource group az group create --name rg_name --location location Where you replace location with the region where you want to create the resource group. You may have [ ]
Feel free to discuss and contribute to this article over at the corresponding GitHub repo. Many people suggest that you should use version control as part of your scientifc workflow. This is usually quickly followed up by recommendations to learn git and to put your project on GitHub. Learning and doing all of this for [ ]
My stepchildren are pretty good at mathematics for their age and have recently learned about Pythagora s theorem $c=\sqrt{a^2+b^2}$ The fact that they have learned about this so early in their mathematical lives is testament to its importance. Pythagoras is everywhere in computational science and it may well be the case that you ll need to compute [ ]
In many introductions to numpy, one gets taught about np.ones, np.zeros and np.empty. The accepted wisdom is that np.empty will be faster than np.ones because it doesn t have to waste time doing all that initialisation. A quick test in a Jupyter notebook shows that this seems to be true! import numpy as np N = [ ]
What is Second Order Cone Programming (SOCP)? Second Order Cone Programming (SOCP) problems are a type of optimisation problem that have applications in many areas of science, finance and engineering. A summary of the type of problems that can make use of SOCP, including things as diverse as designing antenna arrays, finite impulse response [ ]
I am a huge user of Anaconda Python and the way I usually get access to the Anaconda Prompt is to start typing Anaconda in the Windows search box and click on the link as soon as it pops up. Easy and convenient. Earlier today, however, the Windows 10 menu shortcuts for the Anaconda command [ ]
HPC! To cloud or not to cloud . Over the course of my career I have been involved with the provision of High Performance Computing (HPC) at almost every level. As a researcher and research software engineer I have been, and continue to be, a user of many large scale systems. As a member of research [ ]