[Beowulf] Teaching Scientific Computation (looking for the perfect text)

[Nathan Moore]

> >
> > And, an academic license for Matlab is only $100.  That's less than the
>
> Anyone need an adjunct ... :) I was under the impression that the
> license fees were much stiffer than that.  For a cluster, $100*N for N =
> 16 .. 32 is not bad at all.  Or am I missing something.
>
> > textbook likely costs.  Granted Matlab isn't quite as cool as the
> > symbolic manipulators.  It's sort of like a procedural programming
> > language in an interpretive/JITcompile environment with a HUGE and
> > useful subroutine library.
>

Our institution has a site license for Mathematica and between that and a
compiled langauge, I feel guilty telling my students to spend more money on
something that seems to be of only marginal utility.  Also, (and I'm sure
I'm wrong on this), Matlab seems like a tool that's permanently in the minor
leauges.  Sure it has a nice IDE and makes pretty pictures, but so does
mathematica.  Additionally, (at least when I was using it back in the mid
90's), Matlab is an interpreted language.  If you start writing "real" code
on it that will run for days or months, the compiled (C/fortran) equivalent
will be significantly faster (I almost said "orders of magnitude faster,"
but I've never been curious enough to actually make a comparison)
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