Newsletters October 2010

October 2010

Welcome to our October 2010 Newsletter. We are sure that you have also felt the year fly by, no doubt exacerbated by the successful hosting of the Soccer World Cup. If you attended any games, no doubt you contributed to making South Africa the successful host nation we all knew we could be; if you didn't, you missed a spectacular event!

This edition of the newsletter introduces Release 2010b, packed with new features and software updates to MathWorks Products. Our recent Defence Day was a huge success, and we've recorded the presentations for you to view at the office. We also present a local user story (from Cape Universities Brain Imaging Centre), and discuss an exciting local cluster computing trial available to academic users.

We welcome any discussion on these articles.

The OPTI-NUM solutions team. 

Release 2010b: Available Now

Release 2010b was announced in early September 2010. This release of MathWorks Product Family includes new capabilities for 64-bit arithmetic and enumerated data types in MATLAB, enhanced support for large-scale modelling using arrays of buses and subsystem variants in Simulink.  Toolboxes introduce support for GPU computing with CUDA-enabled NVIDIA devices (Parallel Computing Toolbox), enhanced automatic PID tuning (Control System Toolbox), Reuters Contribute functionality (Datafeed Toolbox), various enhancements for financial modelling, and graphical tools for dynamic neural networks (Neural Network Toolbox). Release 2010b also introduces SimRF, a new product based on the SimScape language, for circuit envelope simulation and RF Blockset capabilities.

Customers who are current on Software Maintenance can download Release 2010b, or request a DVD shipment from the License Centre.

Find out more about Release 2010b from The MathWorks.

Defence Day 2010

On 9 September 2010, OPTI-NUM solutions hosted a Defence Day at The Innovation Hub in Pretoria. Attendance was beyond expectations, and presentations from our local guest speakers Adriaan Steenkamp from Flamengro (a division of Armscor) and Paul Herselman from Reutech Radar Systems, complimented talks by John Willey from MathWorks UK. The presentations were  followed by some lunch and lively conversation.

Recordings of the presentations can be found here (registration required).

Our thanks to Paul and Adriaan for the hard work they put into their presentations.

Would you like to present your MATLAB- or Simulink-based work at our upcoming conferences? Contact us with a short description of your work.

Parallel Computing with MATLAB – Academic Trial at CHPC

The Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) is a major initiative of the Department of Science and Technology, consisting of three systems of computer clusters, located in Cape Town and connected to academic institutions through high-speed networks.

Through collaboration with CHPC, OPTI-NUM solutions has made a 128-worker MATLAB Distributed Computing Server available for a trial period. This trial is available to any academic user for testing purposes. Successful trials will influence any decisions by CHPC to make MATLAB available to academic users on an ongoing basis.

For more information about CHPC, click here. For information on how to use MATLAB on the CHPC cluster, click here.

Featured User Story

Our featured user story comes from the Cape Universities Brain Imaging Centre, under the directorship of Dr Bruce Spottiswoode. Bruce and his team at CUBIC use MATLAB to develop highly specialised imaging techniques for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), electroencephalography (EEG) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) brain imaging research.

Read more about how Bruce and his team use MATLAB in their work.

Do you have a story you would like to tell about how MATLAB or Simulink is being used in your work? Contact Carlette to discuss publishing your story in our newsletters and on our web site.

Events

As the year draws to a close, we are in planning for events in 2011. Look out for our announcement of events in early 2011. As always, we invite you to view MathWorks live and recorded online seminars.

24 May 2012	GPU Computing with MATLAB
31 May 2012	Image Processing with MATLAB
05 June 2012	Application Deployment with MATLAB