Octave

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This is not a complete article: This is a draft, a work in progress that is intended to be published into an article, which may or may not be ready for inclusion in the main wiki. It should not necessarily be considered factual or authoritative.

GNU Octave is a scientific programming language that has a Powerful mathematics-oriented syntax with built-in 2D/3D plotting and visualization tools. It is free and open-source software (FOSS) and is Drop-in compatible with many MATLAB scripts.

Running Octave code

Consider the following example code:

File : octave_2d_plot.m

x = -10:0.1:10;
y = sin (x);
plot (x, y);
title ("Simple 2-D Plot");
xlabel ("x");
ylabel ("sin (x)");

print -dpng octave_2d_plot.png
quit

Here is a simple Slurm script that you can use to run octave_2d_plot.m:

File : octave_job_1.sh

#!/bin/bash -l
#SBATCH --time=0-00:10
#SBATCH --ntasks=1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=1
#SBATCH --mem=4000M
module load octave/5.2.0 gnuplot/5.4.2

octave --no-gui octave_2d_plot.m

Note that Octave relies on the Gnuplot package to generate plots.

Running MATLAB code

Octave can often be used as a drop-in replacement for running MATLAB scripts, like the cosplot.m example on our MATLAB page:

File : octave_job_1.sh

#!/bin/bash -l
#SBATCH --time=0-00:10
#SBATCH --ntasks=1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=1
#SBATCH --mem=4000M
module load octave/5.2.0 gnuplot/5.4.2

octave --no-gui --traditional --eval "cosplot"

Further reading

• GNU Octave Homepage
• Documentation for GNU Octave v5.2.0 (available in StdEnv/2020)
• Documentation for GNU Octave v4.2.2 (available in StdEnv/2018.3)