Jack Dongarra is my student, colleague and friend.... read more >>

I have just returned from the MathWorks company meeting celebrating our 40th Anniversary. In one of the presentations, Jos Martin described how Parallel MATLAB was introduced almost twenty years ago. Here are a few slides from Jos's talk.... read more >>

I have just returned from a one-day workshop at U. C. Santa Barbara honoring John Gilbert on his 70th birthday and his official retirement after 20 years on the UCSB faculty.... read more >>

My friend Paul Saylor passed away on November 7th.... read more >>

My colleagues are looking for a matrix to be used in a new benchmark. They've come to the right place.... read more >>

I recently acquired a GPU, a graphics processing unit. It's called a GPU because such processors were originally intended to speed up graphics. But MATLAB uses it to speed up computation. Let's see how the gpuArray object benchmarks on my machine. I have been doing computer benchmarks for years. I like to do profiles where I vary the size of a task and see how the amount of memory required affects performance. I always learn something unexpected when I do these profiles. Ben Todoroff is on the MathWorks Parallel Processing team. Last year he contributed #34080, gpuBench to the MATLAB Central File Exchange. He has been able to compare several different GPUs. I am going to consider the performance of only one GPU, but in more detail. Important note. This is only about double precision. Single precision is another story. ... read more >>

The ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages, SIGPLAN, expects to hold the fourth in a series of conferences on the History of Programming Languages in 2020, see HOPL-IV. The first drafts of papers are to be submitted by August 2018. That long lead time gives me the opportunity to write a detailed history of MATLAB. I plan to write the paper in sections, which I'll post in this blog as they are available. This is the seventh, and final, installment.... read more >>

SC15, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, was held in Austin, Texas, last week, November 15 through 20. This is the largest trade show and conference that MathWorks participates in each year.... read more >>

This is the second of a multi-part series about the MATLAB random number generators. If you ask for help rng, you will get lots of information, including the fact that there are three modern generators.... read more >>

Even though I am one of the founders of the MathWorks, I only acted as an advisor to the company for its first five years. During that time, from 1985 to 1989, I was trying my luck with two Silicon Valley computer startup companies. Both enterprises failed as businesses, but the experience taught me a great deal about the computer industry, and influenced how I viewed the eventual development of MATLAB. The second startup was known as Ardent Computer for most of its brief existence.... read more >>