MacResearch

What follows is an interview with Benoît Jacob and Gael Guennebaud, two developers of the open source Eigen project, which provides incredibly fast C++ matrix and vector numeric code.

We would like to urge everyone who plans to be at the WWDC in two weeks and hasn't submitted a poster yet to do so before this Friday's deadline. The poster session is a great opportunity to get in touch with fellow researchers at the WWDC; "If you're performing cutting-edge scientific or medical research and development using Apple tools and technologies, come share your solutions and breakthroughs with your peers at the WWDC 2008 Scientific Development Poster Session. The Poster Session is a showcase of innovative applications created using the power and flexibility of Mac OS X."

Abstracts should be submitted before this Friday, May 23, 2008.

Theodore Gray is something of a legend in the Mac-using scientific community. You may have seen him onstage with Steve Jobs demonstrating how his company, Wolfram Research, Inc., ported its flagship product, Mathematica, to the Intel Mac in a matter of hours. Theodore founded the company with Stephen Wolfram, initially targeting NeXT systems, and later spreading to all platforms including the Mac. The following interview was conducted via email.

This is an interview with Stefan Eilemann, Senior Software Engineer and Consultant at Tungsten Graphics, who was running the multimonitor display at WWDC07. Stefan was responsible for porting Chromium to MacOSX, and is now working at Eyescale Software developing and deploying Equalizer, a framework for distributed, scalable graphics software. He also kindly provided the images.

Editor’s note: This is an interview with Georg Tuparev of Tuparev Technologies. Georg has a long association with Cocoa development, and counts Astronomy as one of his great passions. Tuparev Technologies has recently been developing software to control telescopes in the MONET project.

A couple of weeks ago I commented on this site the simultaneous news of MestreNova appearing and the future of iNMR being unclear. Now the misleading news has remained in the headlines (in the second page, but still in the headlines) and my comment remains hidden. I feel that my version has the right to be published with the same emphasis and for this reason I am writing today. I say that that the news reported by drc is misleading because:

Aaron Hillegass has been teaching software developers about Mac OS X, and its forerunner at NeXT, for as long as anyone can remember. Recognizable by his enormous cowboy hat, Aaron has written several books, including one on Cocoa development that has become legendary, and runs the Big Nerd Ranch, an enterprise he began after leaving NeXT, which has some of the best courses around for learning Cocoa and other Mac OS X technologies. Recently, Aaron was kind enough to answer some questions for us, and explain how Big Nerd Ranch can help scientific developers on the Mac.

Glen Low probably knows as much about high-performance computing (HPC) on Mac OS X as anyone outside Apple. He is author of macstl, a C++ library that takes advantage of the vector engines in PowerPC and Intel chips to make almost obscene performance gains over scalar code. In the following interview, which was conducted by email, Glen tells us about his software, gives his views on the Intel switch, and offers some tips and tricks on winning an Apple Design Award.

Joe Wolf has worked with compilers for high-performance computing for the past twenty years. He developed optimizing/parallelizing Ada and Fortran compilers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Cray Research, Inc. before joining Intel in 1996. Since then, he has focused on helping customers in all industries adopt and use the Intel® Compilers for all of Intel’s processors and platforms from hand-helds to large clusters.

This is the first of a series of interviews MacResearch is planning with Scientists and Scientific Developers on the Mac. Alexander Griekspoor is from mekentosj.com, which is the team of developers that won the Apple Design Award for Best Mac OS X Scientific Solution at this year's WWDC06 developer conference in San Francisco.