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I attended the IDL Workbench seminar held by “Vis” this afternoon. Despite using the Workbench for the last eight months or so, I learned a few things about it. There are more 1/2 day free seminars coming for both IDL and ENVI. The schedule listed Introduction, Intermediate, and Advanced courses in the Workbench, as well as Advanced Math and Statistics, Building Enterprise Applications, IDL/ENVI for Atmospheric Applications, and a bunch of other ENVI related seminars.

Thanks Mark for the great presentation and thanks Harold and Bill for getting these going!

There’s another IDL event at LASP; this one popular enough to have to be split into two groups. I’m in the afternoon session. See you there!

It’s next Thursday February 21, 2008 at LASP in Boulder.

Here’s my picks for the most important IDL events of 2007 (and a bit of wishing for 2008):

1. Workbench in IDL 7.0: While the new Workbench helped me immensely from the start, I think the most important aspect of the Workbench is that it provides a platform for future features. Now that there is a common code base for all the platforms, I have much greater expectations for the future. Plus, with the ability to install plugins, features can be added without ITT VIS having to do anything.
2. Users group meeting: Does the users group meeting really mark a start to more openness from ITT VIS? There have been more postings on the newsgroup by ITT VIS engineers which has greatly eased the transition to the new Workbench. My biggest wish for IDL in 2008 is expanded ITT VIS support for the IDL user community: more users group meetings, a conference, and/or more online presence.
3. IDL 6.4: Not only did IDL have two releases in year, but also pushed out a fix for a performance issue with the Workbench and a IDL 6.4.1 release to support Mac OS X “Leopard”. While only IDL 7.0 was a major release (although IDL 6.4 had some nice features, it wasn’t exactly earth shattering), each update relieved pain/increased joy for some IDL users.
4. Command line for Windows: I haven’t been able to use this since I don’t have Windows anywhere right now, but I would really like to see the “bonus” features not available in the regular IDL command line. The Workbench brought a lot of improvements to the IDL development environment, I would like to see a few improvements for the command line interface as well.

A pre-release of GPULib was made available today. GPULib is a library of common scientific computational routines that use modern graphics processing units (GPUs) to improve performance. I saw speedups of 5-50 times faster than normal IDL code for example code I was writing. Vectorized code that is still not fast enough can be improved with GPULib.

Bindings for Java, Python, MATLAB, and IDL are available. The IDL bindings are fairly simple to use and have a compatibility mode that allows running the code even without a GPU (performance was approximately equivalent to normal IDL code for the examples I wrote).

The documentation lists all the routines available (IDLdoc 3.0b3 spotted in the wild!).

Full disclosure: I work for Tech-X Corporation and worked on the IDL bindings and examples for GPULib.

Today, ITT VIS released an update to the IDL 7.0 Workbench the speeds up the “Analyzing code” process when the Workbench starts (and gives you a progress level). The details are in a newsgroup post by Bill Okubo. ITT VIS says the update is four times faster and it certainly does seem much faster to me.

The best part was how painless the updating process is now. You just tell the Workbench to go look for updates and it downloads them, applies them, and restarts the Workbench. I wonder if not just the Workbench, but IDL itself, can be updated this way?

Previously available only on Unix platforms, a command line version of IDL was released today by Abraham Campbell. It has a few additional features compared to the Unix version, such as:

1. IDL MP mode allows you to create multiple IDL processes and manipulate them
2. TAB command matching

See this comp.lang.idl-pvwave post for the announcement and the codebank for the download.

I don’t have a Windows machine to run this on right now, but the extra features look like they would be nice on the Unix side too…

IDL 7.0 is officially released today. This introduces the IDL Workbench, a cross platform, Eclipse-based development environment. My favorite features so far:

1. it works the same on Unix platforms!
2. in the debug perspective, you can click on any level in the call stack and examine all the variables defined at that level
3. the outline view (I just like seeing all the routines instead of selecting a routine from a droplist)
4. content assist i.e. hitting a keyboard shortcut and the Workbench pops the possible choices for finishing your current command
5. navigating to the definition of a routine by clicking on a call of the routine in the editor window
6. having a lot of preferences

There are a few negatives as well:

1. no GUI builder (okay, that’s really a positive too)
2. no Workbench interface for conditional breakpoints (you have to use the breakpoint routine)
3. I don’t like the way the online help system works, but I’m willing to admit that could be personal preference

I’m going to try to write some short articles on how to use the Workbench since it is a completely new environment for IDL.

FastDL 2.4 was released today. FastDL provides a way to do cluster computing from within IDL in two different flavors: mpiDL and TaskDL. For problems which require communication between nodes, mpiDL provides an interface to the MPI standard. If you are familiar with MPI, then mpiDL should be very easy to use. It can now be used with MPICH, MPICH2, or OpenMPI implementations of MPI. For problems where nodes do not need to communicate with each other, TaskDL is a task farming solution for IDL.

Full disclosure: I work for Tech-X and did some work on this project.

The IDL 7.0 User’s Group Meeting was tonight. From the ITT VIS website:

Be the First to See the New IDL 7.0!!

Please join us for the IDL User Group Meeting & Reception co-sponsored by ITT Visual Information Solutions and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics(LASP) on November 13, 2007. Hear from IDL engineers and professionals about how IDL 7.0 powers visualization and analysis a whole new way. Immediately following the seminar is a reception celebrating our 30 years of collaboration with the scientific community!

Since I was already using the beta version of IDL 7.0, the points I found most interesting from the presentations:

1. ITT VIS promised a new openness in their plans.
2. There are 150,000 seats of IDL. Mac use is up.
3. There is a developer RSS feed.

Of course, the new IDLDE was demoed. I must say that I have enjoyed using the new DE.

It was great to meet some of you from the newsgroup in person! We should do this more often.