Numerical Algorithms Group
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) is a non-profit software company, whose head office is in Oxford, UK. The group was founded by Brian Ford and others in 1970 as the Nottingham Algorithms Group. NAG specializes in the provision of software for the solution of mathematical, statistical and data mining problems, besides offering visualization software and other services in scientific software development. NAG products are used in a wide range of industries worldwide in order to solve problems in disciplines such as financial analysis, science and engineering and in the fields of education and academic research.
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[edit] Products
[edit] The NAG library
The NAG Numerical Libraries are the oldest and best known product of NAG. NAG Algol 60 and Fortran Libraries, Mark 1, were released in October 1971, for specific ICL mainframe series. The first partially vectorized implementation of the NAG Fortran Library (Cray-1) was released in 1983. A C version was launched in 1990, The NAG C Library, Mark 1. Mark 21 of the Fortran Library was released in September 2005 and Mark 8 of the C Library released in January 2006.
[edit] AXIOM
The Axiom computer algebra system, originally developed by IBM, was bought and distributed by NAG in the 1990s.
[edit] IRIS Explorer
IRIS Explorer is visualisation package with a user environment that allows users and application developers to build applications for visualising complex sets of data. It is built on the OpenGL and Open Inventor standards.
[edit] Company structure
NAG has an interesting organisational structure. It was originally founded by academics from four universities Nottingham, Manchester, Oxford and Birmingham in 1970. That project continued for a number of years and ultimately, was transformed into a UK company in 1976. The libraries had been around for a number of years before that. The intellectual property, which had been contributed from a number of academics and and employees of US government laboratories, was contributed to a non-profit company in the UK and a wholly owned subsidiary in the US formed in 1978. Another thing that is distinctive about NAG is that the company has 300 association members. These are people who contributed code to the company or the products over the years. About 75 or 80 of them are employees; however, the rest of them are academics or commercial organisations, all over the world. They have all created code that was in a research state and donated it to NAG made it more robust and tested it thorough eventually incorporating it into their commercial library.
