Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Sage-3.0 and Beyond

Finally, after much hard work, Sage-3.0 has been released! This release has tons of bug fixes plus several new features such as interact mode in the notebook, the R interface, full GCC-4.3 support, much better automated testing, etc.


Most importantly, Sage-3.0 finally has code for computing with modular abelian varieties. You almost certainly have no clue what those are, but suffice to say that I started the Sage project to compute with them, so having this code in Sage is a major milestone for me and the project.

We dramatically increased our automated testing and example suite so that 51.5 % of functions have autotested examples. There are now nearly 60,000 lines of input examples. In February our testing was in the 30% range. This was a huge amount of work by many many Sage developers, and it has the practical impact that when you type foo? it is nearly twice as likely that you'll see a helpful example.

There is now a new interface to R that uses a pseudotty; this is a completely different alternative to rpy, which makes it possible for the web-based Sage notebook to work as an R GUI, and also makes it so any R command can be used from Sage 100% exactly as in R. It is still clunky and has numerous issues, but it is fairly usable, documented, and has a test suite. Here it is drawing a plot in the notebook:



So what is the next step for Sage? We have finished rapidly expanding by incorporating major new components. Now we will work on making Sage more accessible and writing new code to make Sage highly competitive with all other options. I see The main goals for this coming year are as follows:
  1. Port Sage and as many of its components as possible to Microsoft Windows (32 and 64-bit, MSVC) and to Sun's Solaris. For the Windows port the main challenge is writing a native implementation of pexpect for 32 and 64-bit MSVC windows, and porting several math software projects (e.g., R) that until now haven't had the resources to move beyond 32-bit crippled mingw/cygwin. For Solaris, the main issues are simply fixing bugs and improving the quality of the Sage codebase. Michael Abshoff is leading the charge.
  2. Modular forms and L-functions -- greatly improve all linear algebra needed for modular forms computation; implement a much wider range of algorithms; run large computations and record results in a database. Mike Rubinstein and I will lead the charge.
  3. Symbolic calculus -- a native optimized and much more general implementation of symbolic Calculus in Sage. Gary Furnish is leading the charge.
  4. Combinatorics -- migrate the mupad-combinat group to Sage; implementation of a lot more native group theory in Sage. Mike Hansen is leading the charge.
  5. Statistics -- integrate R and scipy.stats much more fully into Sage with the goal of making Sage the best available environment for statistical computation and education. Harald Schilly is leading the charge.
  6. The Sage notebook -- separate the notebook from Sage (like I did with Cython); develop the notebook's interactive and visualization functionality much more, and make the notebook easier to use as a graphical frontend for all math software. I am leading the charge until I can find somebody else to do so.
  7. Magma -- greatly improve the ability of Sage and Magma to work together (many more automatic conversions between Sage and Magma datastructures, etc.); Magma is by far the best in the world and numerous calculations, and much important code been written in Magma, so it's critical that Sage be fully able leverage all that functionality. Also, this will make comparing the capabilities of the two systems much easier. I'm also leading the charge here.
All of the above goals have received new financial support from industry or the NSF. For example, Microsoft is funding the Windows port, Google is funding many of the above projects, and the NSF is strongly funding a big modular forms and L-functions database project. The sage-devel mailing list has 434 members and over 1000 posts/month, and each Sage release has about 30 contributors. The size of the serious core Sage developer community might be nearing that of Mathematica's core developer group. Now is the moment in time when we have a chance to... create a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Google Funds Sage!!

Today Chris DiBona (open source programs manager at Google) fully funded a proposal [pdf] that some students and I put together to carry out four critically important Sage development projects this summer (2008):

  • Mike Hansen (UCSD): Implement combinatorial species in Sage. This will provide a backend to handle a wide range of new combinatorial objects with minimal effort.
  • Gary Furnish (Utah): Implement new optimized symbolic manipulation code in Cython. This will greatly speed up symbolic computation in Sage, and reduce Sage's dependence on Maxima.
  • Robert Miller (UW): Implement fast code for permutation groups and backtracking algorithms. This is needed for general applications to graph and code automorphism groups computations, and can be used to exhaustively generate isomorphism class representatives of a wide class of mathematical objects.
  • Yi Qiang (UW): Further document, improve the usability of, and provide numerous real world examples of distributed computing with Sage. This will greatly help in applications of Sage to research that involve parallel computation.


This funding is not part of the Google Summer of Code (the projects above do not fit with any of the mentoring organizations), but is instead I hope part of more longterm support by Google for the Sage project and open source mathematical software that provides people with a free alternative to Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, and Magma.