Free Software: Your Tax Dollars at Work

• Access Grid Release 3.0 is a group collaboration software that is developed by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, Ill., is group collaborative software. It is essentially videoconferencing with life-size displays and full duplex, hands-free audio. Open source and free to download, Access Grid is compatible with Windows, Linux, and Apple OSX platforms and is built upon standards-compliant technologies such as SOAP,WSDL, FTP, SSL, and Jabber. The number of cameras and visible participants during conferencing is limited only by available bandwidth, and both the client and server are free.

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• Computing resources that include arrays of thousands of processors are widely used, and the focus is now on the availability of high-performance algorithms able to make these simulations happen. Enter hypre, a catalog of high performance pre-conditioners pioneered by Robert Falgout at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Calif.
  
  hypre’s linear solvers are specifically geared for these parallel computing systems because of a scalable multilevel approach developed at LLNL. Iterative in nature, the system involves breaking up large grids into multiple smaller grids that use inexpensive “smoothers” to resolve low-frequency errors. Improved guesses obtained at the coarser grids are then passed back to the finest linear grids.
  
  Interpolation yields a computationally cheaper solution, and, more importantly, the cost should only depend linearly on the problem size. The result is a scalable solver algorithm.
  
  Free to download and actively supported, hypre is well-suited for use on machines such as IBM’s BlueGene/L and for solving problems in radiation transport, elasticity, and magneto-hydrodynamics.