A. The Simons Agreement

Magma is a large Computer Algebra system that specializes in those areas of mathematics which make heavy use of algebraic ideas and techniques. It is currently used in more than 70 countries and has been cited in at least 6000 publications.

Magma is developed by the Magma Group at the University of Sydney together with a large network of external individuals and research groups.

While the research underpinning many of the algorithms contained in Magma is mainly funded by grants for basic research, such support is not available to cover costs incurred in developing robust implementations of algorithms and in building the necessary software infrastructure and user interfaces. Instead, this is raised by charging a distribution/maintenance levy. This levy also covers the cost of building binaries for the popular platforms, the preparation of user documentation, the provision of basic support for users, and a bug fixing service.

An agreement between the Magma Group at the University of Sydney and the Simons Foundation makes Magma much more widely available within the US.

Specifically, the Simons Foundation will underwrite the distribution/maintenance costs associated with making Magma available to people employed by, studying at, or affiliated with a US non-profit non-government educational or scientific research institution.

The Agreement came into effect on August 1, 2013, initially for a period of three years. It has been successively renewed in three-year periods so that the current Agreement remains in force at least up until July 31, 2025.

B. Who is Eligible?

B1 For the purposes of this Agreement an organization is defined as an "Eligible Organization" if it meets one or more of the following criteria:

1. The organization is a U.S. educational or scientific organization that has received tax exempt status pursuant to section 501 (c)(3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service; or
2. The organization is a U.S. public university, such as the University of California or a United States service academy.

B2 A "Participating Organization" is an Eligible Organization that acquires access to Magma under this Agreement, or that already has access to Magma and continues it under this Agreement (as per Section D).

B3 While the Simons Agreement remains in force, all Eligible Organizations applying for the provision of Magma will be automatically enrolled under this Agreement unless they request otherwise.

B4 The Agreement covers all people employed by, studying at, or affiliated with an Eligible Organization.

B5 In general, Magma will not be available directly to individual users under this Agreement.

1. Personal Versions: Only available for teachers and researchers who are living in retirement and who are unable to obtain a version through their former institution. Such applicants may apply directly; they will need to supply evidence of their status.
2. Developer Versions: People and groups who have developer status can maintain their existing developer accounts or switch to a Simons account.
3. Student Versions: Students are expected to obtain access to Magma through their school.

C. Period of Support

Support for users under this scheme will be provided for the periods defined below:

C1 Eligible Organizations that acquire Magma under this Agreement will receive support for the duration of the Agreement (including any extensions or renewals of this Agreement), or for one year from the date on which they first receive Magma, whichever period is the longer.

C2 Support for private machines covered by a Participating Organization (home versions) will be on the same basis as the parent institution. In particular, changes of machine will be possible throughout the support period as defined in clause G5.

C3 When the period of support for Magma provided under this Agreement ends, Magma will continue to run on the machines that were covered during the designated period of support. However, there will be no further access under this Agreement to the Magma download page and no new machines can be added to the list of Magma hosts registered by the Eligible Organization during the period in which the Agreement was in force.

D. The Transfer of Existing Magma Sites

D1 An Eligible Organization that has already paid for a period of support prior to this Agreement, and which is still current on the Effective Date, will be transferred to this Agreement unless the organization wishes otherwise.

D2 If such an organization does transfer to this Agreement, then at the end of the period of support provided by this Agreement the Magma Group support will continue for a period equal to the length of the unused portion of the period provided by their prior agreement directly with the Magma Group.

D3 Eligible Organizations transferring to the Simons Agreement from a previous contract with the Magma Group are asked to promptly update their versions of Magma so as to obtain versions displaying the Simons Banner.

D4 Organizations transferring to the Simons Agreement are encouraged to take advantage of the Agreement to extend their use of Magma by registering more hosts.

E. Conditions

E1 The Magma Group/University of Sydney supplies the software on an "as-is basis". There is no warranty express or implied for this software product. The Magma Group/University of Sydney and the Simons Foundation are not liable for failure of the software to perform in the manner specified or for losses resulting from failure of the software to perform as required.

E2 The system may not be used on processors other than those designated without written permission.

E3 It is the responsibility of a Participating Organization and users to take reasonable steps to prevent copying (either manually or electronically) of the system by unauthorized persons.

E4 When calculations undertaken using Magma contribute to research which is published, the authors are requested to acknowledge the use of Magma in the publication.

F. Getting Magma

F1 The provision of Magma under this Agreement is subject to the same rules and procedures that apply in the case where the user organization directly pays a distribution/maintenance charge. The distribution is organized so as to minimize the administrative workload of the Magma Group and hence keep the costs low.

F2 For a given organizational unit, such as a department or research group, a designated person (henceforth referred to as the "Designated Contact" for that unit) must be responsible for the distribution and management of Magma within that unit. In particular, all requests for new platforms, changes to platforms, downloads of new releases, etc. must go through the Designated Contact. The Magma Group will not issue a separate download account for each desktop user in the organization.

F3 The process of setting up a download account for Magma under this Agreement proceeds as follows:

The Eligible Organization contacts the Magma Group at magma@maths.usyd.edu.au and provides the following information:

1. Name and address of the organization.
2. Name and address of the Department, Unit or Research Group on behalf of which Magma is sought.
3. Name, address and email address of the Head of the Department, Unit or Research Group.
4. A short email from the Head requesting Magma under the Agreement and stating that they accept the Terms and Conditions (as described in Section E). The letter should also nominate the Designated Contact.
5. Name, address and email address of the Designated Contact (DC). All email communications from the DC should use an institutional email address. Failure to do will result in delays.
6. An initial list of platform types (as described in Section G). These can be subsequently updated at any time.
7. The MAC addresses for the initial choice of platforms. These can be subsequently updated at any time. This is not needed for those platforms that will only be used for the student version (see Clauses I6 to I8).

F4 After verifying the organization's eligibility and the credentials of the DC the Magma Group will create a download account for designated Department, Unit or Research Group. A key file for the listed platforms will also be sent.

F5 The DC downloads the software and supporting files from the Magma website or other suitable location as directed by the Magma Group. This involves the following steps:

1. Download the Magma executable for each platform type from the Download Page.
2. Download the package, documentation and database files. These are all found in the single file named shared_complete.tar.gz, which is listed on the per-platform download pages as well as separately here. The contents of this file are compatible with all platform types.
3. Install Magma on each platform. See the installation FAQ for instructions for each platform.
4. It is important to remember to install the key file in the correct place on each platform. This can be tested by invoking Magma via the "magma" script. If the command prompt ">" appears then the installation is correct.
5. Variation 1: For platforms that host only the student version, NO key file is required.
6. Variation 2: A number of very useful databases are not included in the file "shared_complete.tar.gz" because of their size. These include, for example, the group representations listed in the ATLAS of Finite Group Representations. These optional databases can be found at the database download page and those that are relevant to the organization's users should be downloaded and placed in the directory libs/data within the Magma installations.

F6 If the student version is to be made available to a large number of people then the DC may place it on a internal web site for download by eligible students.

F7 It should be noted that the Magma Group does not provide either the software or supporting files on physical media (tapes, DVDs, etc).

G. Platforms

G1 Magma platforms may include desktops, laptops, servers and clusters.

G2 Platforms on which Magma is to be used must, with the two exceptions noted below, be owned or leased by the institution. The two exceptions to this rule are:

1. An Eligible Organization may request versions for members of staff who wish to run Magma on machines which have been purchased with their personal funds.
2. Students given access to the student version may run it on their personal machines.

G3 Each platform on which Magma is to run at a Participating Organization must be registered with the Magma Group. This usually means supplying platform identification such as a MAC address. This information is used to generate a keyfile which is used by Magma at runtime to establish that the platform is registered.

G4 The kernel of Magma is supplied in binary form and so the platforms selected as Magma hosts must be a subset of those supported by the Magma Group. The supported platforms are currently x86_32/Linux, x86_64/Linux, x86_64/Mac OSX and x86_32/Windows.

G5 There is no particular limit to the number of platforms on which an Eligible Organization may choose to run Magma.

G6 The Eligible Organization may also supply versions of Magma to staff and students for use on institutionally-owned home machines and personally-owned machines. If the standard version of Magma is required, these machines must be registered with the Magma Group and a keyfile obtained.

G7 A registered platform may not be used to provide access to Magma for users who are neither employees, students or affiliates of the Participating Organization, except as indicated in Clause G8.

G8 With permission from the Magma Group, a registered platform may in some circumstances be used to host an on-line database constructed by an employee or affiliate of the Eligible Organization where Magma is used to answer database queries. In such circumstances there should be no access to any standard Magma commands by outside users of the database.

H. Key Files

H1 Each machine that is to host any version of Magma other than the student version under this Agreement must be registered with the Magma Group by the Participating Organization.

H2 The registration is accomplished by the Designated Contact forwarding identifying information for each such machine. This information is used to generate a key file which will be required by all versions of Magma (excepting the student version) to verify that the platform on which it is running is a registered host.

H3 The Magma Group will inform the Designated Contact as to what information is required for their machines; it is expected that for any particular machine this information will be limited to one of the following: The MAC address(es), IP address(es), or hostid. Information that identifies any particular user of a machine will not be required.

H4 At any time during the period of support, the Designated Contact may request that new machines be registered as Magma hosts under the Agreement.

H5 At any time during the period of support, the Designated Contact may request that an existing machine be deregistered as a Magma host and a new one added in its place.

H6 The student version does not require a key file in order to execute on a machine.

I. Versions of Magma

The term "standard version" is used to refer to the unrestricted version of Magma, in contrast to the restricted student version.

I1 The versions of Magma provided under the Agreement will have a distinctive banner stating that provision of the version has been made possible through funds provided by the Simons Foundation.

I2 The kernel of Magma is supplied in binary form so that the Eligible Organization is relieved of the burden of having to build the system.

I3 The platforms selected as Magma hosts must be a subset of those supported by the Magma Group. The platforms currently supported are x86_32/Linux, x86_64/Linux, x86_64/Mac OSX and x86_32/Windows.

I4 In the case of the x86/Linux versions, several alternate versions are provided corresponding to different hardware architectures. For example, a version is available for processors having the AVX extensions to the x86 instruction set (which includes most Intel processors released since 2010).

I5 The standard version can only be run on hosts for which the appropriate key file is available. This key file will generated by the Magma Group and sent to the Eligible Organization at the time that the host is registered with the Group.

I6 A special version of Magma is available for undergraduate teaching. This version has a limit on the maximum size of workspace allowed (currently 150 MB).

I7 The student version does not need a key file in order to run. Hence it is not restricted to registered machines and so can be made available to large classes of students for use on either institutional or personal machines without the need to collect MAC addresses for the intended hosts.

I8 The student version is available on a more restricted set of hosts. At present these are x86_32/Linux, x86_32/Windows and x86_64/Mac OSX.

J. Software and Support Services Provided

J1 Binaries for Magma are provided on the supported platforms so that the user does not have to build Magma from source files.

J2 During the period the Agreement is in place, Designated Contacts may download any or all of the patch releases and major releases (1 major release + 12-15 patch releases per year).

J3 As part of the Magma distribution, the user has access to some 50 databases containing tables of important information. These include all groups of order up to 2000 (excluding 1024), the Cremona tables of elliptic curves having conductor up to 300,000, and many others.

J4 A range of electronic documentation is included:

1. Various short introductions to the system.
2. The Magma Handbook which fully documents all features of the system. It contains extensive examples including advanced applications.
3. An e-book, "Solving Problems with Magma", which describes a wide range of applications with complete code and commentary.

J5 Various flavours of help system are provided:

1. A sophisticated HTML help system is provided whose content is similar to the Magma Handbook.
2. A simple text-based help system is also provided.
3. The name of an intrinsic can be used to retrieve a short description of its behaviour.

J6 Email assistance with the installation of Magma is provided to the Designated Contact for any registered platform.

J7 While the Magma Group does not provide programming assistance for users, it is sometimes possible to provide advice to users as to how major computational problems might be best tackled using Magma.

J8 Users are strongly encouraged to report bugs. Where possible, the Magma Group endeavours to fix bugs quickly and makes the fixes available through frequent patch releases.