Maplesoft Launches Comprehensive Maple 15 Release

In what it calls the most comprehensive release of its technical computing software in five years, Maplesoft has released Maple 15, an upgrade stocked with over 270 new mathematical functions and over a 1,000 enhancements to existing algorithms.

With the Maple 15 release, the product has made "the transition to a modern, interactive problem-solving approach to math," says Dr. Tom Lee, Maplesoft's vice president of applications engineering. "We've done a major overhaul of stuff under the hood and the core machinery of the math system," he says. "The upgrade offers a practical and accessible combination of advanced engineering tools that even if you're not a PhD-level engineer, you can deploy some fairly sophisticated thinking into your design work."

The Maple 15 upgrade advances functionality in four key areas: Parallel processing, user interface enhancements, computational algorithms and connectivity to other tools.

In the area of parallel processing, Maple 15 supports automatic parallelism, which means the software automatically takes advantage of multiple cores or grid computing without any user invention to parallelize certain classes of problems and speed operations. In addition, the upgrade will launch multiple processes on all the cores in a machine at the user level without the need for additional set up. Support for multithreading programming and NVIDIA's CUDA enabled graphics cards also serves to speed up computations.

Among the interface enhancements in Maple 15 is the new Variable Manager, which helps users better manage worksheets, assess the state of computations and inspect variable values without having to navigate through documents. New embedded data tables facilitate working with large data sets, and the software features a variety of interactive assistants and task templates to acquaint users with its functionality. The MapleCloud document repository, a data storage and collaborative community, also facilitates interaction with like users.

Beyond the interface enhancements, the core math engine in Maple 15 has been greatly improved and the upgrade also features improved connectivity to other packages, including Excel, HTTP, code generation and CAD packages.