This year, the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) marks its 40th anniversary. NAG may not be an association at the forefront of your mind, but if you work in the energy business, you've certainly reaped the benefits. NAG has been quietly affecting financial engineering and all areas of technical and scientific research since its inception.
Software has many forms in the energy business. Risk management, commodities trading, logistics, and compliance regulation all rely on software to help analyze, identify, manage, schedule, and report data.
NAG, a leader in high quality computational software and high performance computing services to tens of thousands of users in major academies, Global 500 companies, and the world's leading supercomputing sites among others, will mark its 40th anniversary in 2010 by expanding its student prize program intended to cultivate the next generation of numerical software talent worldwide.
Stuart Feldman, Google VP Engineering, commenting on NAG's influence on his career, says, "I have fond memories of visiting NAG early in my career, having fascinating discussions about software, numerical and scientific programming.
My own involvement originally focused on my interest in Fortran and in my own astrophysics research.
This expanded over the years to general interests in arithmetic and algebra. As I moved into other areas of computing, it was very useful to reference the needs of the classic scientific community," he continued.
"NAG, in addition to being a major contributor to important international standards including Fortran 90 and IEEE arithmetic, has perhaps made its biggest contribution by creating a reliable shared base for scientific computing – a basic set of software that could be depended on, that covered the basic needs of much of classic numerical analysis and that improves over time and on an evolving set of platforms."
The new NAG 40th Anniversary Awards are intended to help nurture the next generation of leaders in science and computing. In the spirit of NAG's four decades of collaboration with leaders in computing, academia
and industry, NAG will be inviting departments, from institutions across the world, to become involved with the student prizes. Awards will be offered for the best performances in a Masters of Science program, best projects and/or best numerical solutions.
Other NAG–funded prizes include The Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software, the NAG Prize in Applied Numerical Computing, and the NAG Prize in Mathematical Finance.
Rob Meyer, NAG's CEO commented: "Nearly every challenge that we face today—global warming, developing energy sources to sustain economic growth worldwide, creating vaccines for the pandemics of today and tomorrow, to name a few—will be solved, in part, with innovative approaches to numerical computing and the most up to date processor platforms."
Helping with this has been NAG's mission since inception, and by extending the NAG Awards, the association hopes "to help institutions focus on the development of numerical code with direct application in many fields and to attract the talent that will support the processor technologies of tomorrow."
Originally an outgrowth of several UK universities, the Numerical Algorithms Group is an Oxford, UK–headquartered not–for–profit numerical software development organization that collaborates with world–leading researchers and practitioners in academia and industry. Today, NAG maintains offices in Manchester, Chicago, Tokyo and Taipei, and a worldwide network of support partners.
More Oil & Gas Financial Journal Current Issue Articles
More Oil & Gas Financial Journal Archives Issue Articles
View Oil and Gas Articles on PennEnergy.com
