The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) is a non-profit software company, whose head office is in Oxford, UK. The group was founded by Brian Ford and others in 1970 as the Nottingham Algorithms Group. NAG specializes in the provision of software for the solution of mathematical, statistical and data mining problems, besides offering visualization software and other services in scientific software development. NAG products are used in a wide range of industries worldwide in order to solve problems in disciplines such as financial analysis, science and engineering and in the fields of education and academic research
Contents |
Products
The NAG library
The NAG Numerical Libraries are the oldest and best known product of NAG. NAG Algol 60 and Fortran Libraries, Mark 1, were released in October 1971, for specific ICL mainframe series. The first partially vectorized implementation of the NAG Fortran Library (Cray-1) was released in 1983. A C version was launched in 1990, The NAG C Library, Mark 1. Mark 22 of the Fortran Library was released in March 2009 and Mark 8 of the C Library released in November 2005 [1] with Mark 9 being due for release in 2009.
AXIOM
The Axiom computer algebra system, originally developed by IBM, was bought and distributed by NAG from the 1990s until 2001, when commercial exploitation was abandoned and it was open sourced.
IRIS Explorer
IRIS Explorer is visualisation package with a user environment that allows users and application developers to build applications for visualising complex sets of data. It is built on the OpenGL and Open Inventor standards. NAG released version 5.2 on some platforms in 2005 while other platforms remain at version 5.0.
NAG Fortran Compiler
The NAG Fortran Compiler is available on all major Unix platforms as well as Microsoft Windows. Based on the world's first Fortran 90 compiler, it currently includes support for the full Fortran 95 language, as well as many Fortran 2003 features.
Company structure
NAG has an unusual organisational structure. It was founded by academics from four universities Nottingham, Manchester, Oxford and Birmingham in 1970. That project continued for a number of years and ultimately, was transformed into a UK company in 1976. The libraries had been around for a number of years before that. The intellectual property, which had been contributed from a number of academics and employees of US government laboratories, was contributed to a non-profit company in the UK and a wholly owned subsidiary in the US formed in 1978. Another thing that is distinctive about NAG is that the company has 300 association members. These are people who contributed code to the company or the products over the years. About 75 or 80 of them are employees; however, the rest of them are academics or commercial organisations, all over the world. They have all created code that was in a research state and donated it to NAG. NAG made it more robust and tested it thoroughly, eventually incorporating it into their commercial library.
Management
The current Chief Executive Officer of NAG is Robert W. Meyer. A former engineering student at Washington University in St. Louis, he was the Executive Vice President of U.S. operations for NAG before being promoted to his current post. Dr. Meyer divides his time among NAG's Chicago, Oxford and Tokyo offices and is a resident of Wheaton, Illinois [2]
References
- ^ NAG announces new release of its numerical library for C and C++ NAG Press Release
- ^ [1]
External links
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
