[GAP Forum] The new UnitLib Package

[Bettina Eick]

Dear Forum,

it is my pleasure to announce the new GAP Package UnitLib.

The UnitLib Package is a group library containing the normalized unit
groups of the modular group algebras of the finite p-groups of order
at most 243 = 3^5. The normalized unit groups in the library are
represented as PcGroups.

For a p-group G and the field with p elements K, GAP can compute its
modular group algebra KG an the Laguna Package of GAP can determine
its normalized unit group as PcGroup. In fact, this algorithm of the
Laguna Package has been used to determine the groups in the UnitLib
Package. However, the computation of a normalized unit group for a
group of order 64 or more can be very time-consuming. Hence it seems
useful to have a library of precomputed normalized unit groups available.

If G is a group of order p^n, then its normalized unit group over the
field with p elements has the order p^(p^n-1). Thus the library contains
quite large groups and, consequently, it needs a fair amount of storage
space. More precisely, the Unitlib Package requires 20 MB of disk space.

The UnitLib Package is available from its homepage
        http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~alexk/unitlib.htm
and also from the GAP packages page
        http://www.gap-system.org/Packages/packages.html

The UnitLib Package is written in the GAP language and it requires the
GAP packages GAPDoc, LAGUNA and QaoS.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof. Dr. Bettina Eick                       Department of Mathematics
Room:  F 612                                   University Braunschweig
Tel:   ++49 (0)531 391 7525                          Pockelsstrasse 14
Fax:   ++49 (0)531 391 8206                         38106 Braunschweig
email: beick at tu-bs.de                                          Germany
-----------------------------------------------------------------------