Scientific computing and programming in the cloud using open source platforms: An illustration using weighted voting systems on the Scilab computing environment

Abstract: There are by  now several cloud computing engines, the most widely known of which is wolframalpha.com. One may type Mathematica-like commands and syntax into a dialog box on a web browser and have the computational results performed on a Mathematica server and these sent back to the client web browser. There are several other cloud computers including  webR (for R statistical computing)  and Scilab on Cloud India (for Scilab numerical computing). Scilab is an open-source numerical computational platform similar in many respects to Matlab. We illustrate the ease and versatility of the Scilab cloud computer with several short voting routines.  We present Scilab routines to calculate voter power indices based on (1)the Banzhaf power index, (2) the Shapley-Shubik power index, (3) The Johnston power index and (4) the randomized Shapley-Shubik power index calculator based on the Central Limit theorem. We use these algorithms to illustrate the ease of writing short Scilab program as well as to illustrate the powerful built-in routines in Scilab especially for random number generation. We then perform these calculations by simply copying and pasting the instructions into a web browser to be performed by the Scilab cloud server and the results sent back to the client Web browser.  We demonstrate these cloud computing engines on two mobile platforms: the iOS system using an iPad and the Android system using an Android mobile phone. It can be argued that cloud computing is a trend that may compete, if not displace, the apps paradigm for mobile devices. As an alternative to installing apps on a mobile device a user with an Internet connection and a browser interface may choose the computing power offered through a cloud computing service.