ActiveState adds popular scientific packages to distribution

ActiveState, the Canadian software company that develops and distributes tools for dynamic languages like Perl and Python, announced last week that they are rolling three packages heavily used in scientific computing into their base distribution for Python, ActivePython

In response to the growing demand for Python in heavy data-centric scientific computing and financial modeling applications, ActiveState is releasing three key packages in ActiveState’s award-winning Python distribution, ActivePython:

  • NumPy: the fundamental library needed for scientific and financial computing with Python as it contains a powerful N-dimensional array object,  advanced array slicing methods,  convenient array reshaping methods and libraries with numerical routines for basic linear algebra functions, basic Fourier transforms and sophisticated random number capabilities.
  • SciPy:  a suite of scientific tools for Python. It depends on the NumPy library, and it gathers a variety of high-level science and engineering modules together as a single package.
  • matplotlib: A Python numerical plotting library that provides production quality 2-D numerical plotting functionality in a variety of hardcopy formats and interactive environments across platforms.

This is an interesting data point that indicates those of you building HPC software should probably be considering support Python bindings. The new packages won’t be available in the (free) community edition download, though of course you’re still able to continue to download them yourself.

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