Saturday, November 21, 2009

SAGE: Calculus Research Lab!

Well, its not official, but we are going to try to set up a SAGE Lab course for this Spring!  The Spring section will meet every day (during some student's lunch periods).  Next year, we hope to have a full year course meeting everyother day.
Now that we have the new Fedora Lab, I think we'll install SAGE on a cluster.  Let's see if we can cluster SAGE using dSAGE or mpiPy which is part of the Python distribution included with SAGE. 


I think that running SAGE on a cluster will be more efficient than setting up a local SAGE server or even using the online SAGE sever at http://www.sagenb.org as we had originally planned.  Its easy to use dSAGE on a multicore PC (SMP) but, setting up SAGE on a grid (much less a hybrid cluster) is not that obvious.  We are going to have a little fun experimenting with all this!


SAGE is definitely working out as an alternative to Mathematica.  We have used Octave before (alternative to MATLAB) but, the more I use SAGE, the more I am convinced that the students can learn it very quickly and get a lot of use out of it when studying Calculus.  We also looked at C, C++, java and R, but I don't think that Calculus Research Lab is going to be a full-blown programming course.  However, while using SAGE, we will program some functions in Python ala Mathematical Computing or Scientific Computing (Newton's Method, Riemann Sums, Euler's Method, etc).


Teaching with Technology, 
calcpage@aol.com

No comments:

Post a Comment