The NAG Blog

Here at NAG we have a lot of rules governing how we write our code. These include things like which constructs we're allowed to use (not all compilers support complete specifications of languages such as Fortran 2003), how we allocate and deallocate memory (we insist on explicit deallocation in the same program scope as the original allocation to avoid memory leaks), how we name and declare variables etc. For many of these we have tools which can verify that the rules are being adhered to, some of which are based on our own compiler. For the rest, however, we rely on an internal peer review process where a colleague checks our work independently to ensure that it conforms to our standards. Recently a case arose where a relatively new colleague was writing a rather complicated piece of code and he came up against a problem. Being a clever chap he came up with an elegant solution which worked perfectly in the context that he was working in and required only a minimal change to t…

What's in a catch phrase?

As you will hopefully know, NAG's strapline is "Results Matter. Trust NAG".

What matters to you, our customers, is results. Correct results that you can rely on. Our strapline invites you to trust NAG - our people and our software products - to deliver that for you.

When I joined NAG to help develop the High Performance Computing (HPC) services and consulting business, one of the early discussions raised the possibility of using a new version of this strapline for our HPC business, reflecting the performance emphasis of the increased HPC activity. Probably the best suggestion was "Performance Matters. Trust NAG." Close second was "Productivity Matters. Trust NAG."

The European Medical Device Technology (EMDT) magazine interviewed me recently. InsideHPC also has pointed to the interview here.

The interview discusses false hopes of users: "Computers will always get faster – I just have to wait for the next processor and my application will run faster."

We still see this so often - managers, researchers, programmers even - all waiting for the silver bullet that will make multicore processors run their application faster with no extra effort from them. There is nothing now or coming soon that will do that except for a few special cases. Getting performance from multicore processors means evolving your code for parallel processing. Tools and parallelized library plugins can help - but in many cases they won't be a substitute for re-writing key parts of the code using multithreading or similar techniques.

Of course, NAG can help ...

The NAG website has a section called "Meet our experts - NAG out and about", which gives a list of upcoming events worldwide that NAG experts will be attending or presenting at.

The page also notes: "We regularly organise and participate in conferences, seminars and training days with our customers and partners. If you would like to talk to us about hosting a NAG seminar at your organisation or any training requirements you might have email us at sales@nag.co.uk".

In my own focus of high performance computing (HPC), I have previously written (for ZDNet UK) about some key supercomputing events. For those of you interested in meeting up with HPC experts (especially from NAG!), I have set up a survey of HPC events - please let us know which events you plan to attend in 2011 - and see which events other readers of The NAG Blog are attending.