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Scientific Computing with Free GNU / Linux Software
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2. Introduction
GNU/Linux is probably the platform of choice for scientific computing. There
exists a wide variety of high level languages, debugging tools and other code
development tools for programming, numerical subroutines for solving various
types of equations, plotting and visualization packages, word processing software
which can display equations and figures and in fact parallel programming software
to construct a supercomputer with off the shelf PC parts and some hardware.
This document aims to provide a list of free software for carrying out the above tasks and links to tutorials and other documents
on how to setup and use these software applications.
This document does not aim to provide links to subject specific free software
available for GNU/Linux systems. It aims to show how GNU/Linux can be used best
to handle scientific computing tasks. It is hoped that people or institutions
with interest in a specific subject list, compile a list of the free software
available for that subject ... for example see Linux for Astronomy, Linux for Biotechnology and Linux for Chemistry at The Random Factory . Another site with a lot of links (to commercial and free) scientific software
is Scientific Applications on Linux. The GNU Software Directory also has links to many of the links provided in this howto plus many more topic
specific software. The software links provided are classified into
Just installing GNU/Linux on your PC makes it a powerful workstation. The various
popular distributions however do not have all the tools needed to make it the
ideal scientific computing machine. This HOWTO aims to fill in this gap by creating
a list of free software useful for scientific computing. It is assumed that people
reading this document already have a PC with Linux and the GNU utilities installed.
For those who do not have such a setup and want to install GNU-Linux can check
out GNU/Linux Systems for links to documents on installing GNU/Linux, and also on how to get started
using GNU/Linux. Recently there has been an effort by Dirk Eddelbuettel to create
a scientific computing environment Quantian which probably is the first GNU-Linux distribution tailored for Scientists.
I do hope other distributions too start providing these software applications.
Scientific Computing with Free Linux Software
Table of Contents
0. Home
1. Preamble
2. Introduction
3. Code Development Tools
3.1. Programming Languages
3.2. Debugging Tools
3.3. Version Control Tools
3.4. Integrated Development Environments
4. Mathematics Packages
5. Numerical Methods and Libraries
6. Graphics and Visualization
7. Programming systems for GNU/Linux
8. Word-Processing and Poster presenting tools on Linux
9. Free Database Management Systems for Linux
10. Linux in the laboratory
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