Study of Free Alternative Numerical Computation Packages

Matlab is the most popular commercial package for numerical computations in mathematics, statistics, the sciences, engineering, and other fields. Octave, FreeMat, and Scilab are free numerical computational packages that have many of the same features as Matlab. They are available to download on the Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. We investigate whether these packages are viable alternatives to Matlab for uses in teaching and research. We compare the packages under Linux on one compute node with two quad-core Intel Nehalem processors (2.66 GHz, 8 MB cache) and 24 GB of memory that is part of an 86-node distributed-memory cluster. After performing both usability and performance tests on Matlab, Octave, FreeMat, and Scilab, we conclude that Octave is the most usable and most powerful freely available numerical computation package. Both FreeMat and Scilab exhibited some incompatibility with Matlab and some performance problems in our tests. Therefore, we conclude that Octave is the best viable alternative to Matlab because not only was it fully compatible with Matlab, but it also exhibited the best performance. This paper reports on work done while working for the REU Site: Interdisciplinary Program in High Performance Computing at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.