Wolfram Research has released an update to its grid computing application, , which now includes Mathematica 5, Wolfram's technical computing software. The update delivers large performance gains in dense numerical linear algebra, support for sparse numerical linear algebra, large-scale linear programming, arbitrary precision computation, and interprocess communication speed. Pricing is per eight nodes.

Version 1.1 capitalizes on a new TCP/IP protocol in Mathematica 5 that
allows it to communicate at the speed of the underlying network. On most
standard networks this means that users will see bandwidth improvements of a
factor of 10 and latency improvements of a factor of 200; on faster networks
the gains are even higher.



"Mathematica 5 now offers the fastest technical computing on a single
computer. gridMathematica 1.1 multiplies that by the grid to provide the
best high-performance computing environment available," says Roger
Germundsson, Director of R&D at Wolfram. Both individual users
and large-scale organizations can optimize their computations with this
sophisticated, easy-to-use alternative for high-level programming
applications.



With gridMathematica, simple commands such as ParallelEvaluate,
ParallelTable, and ParallelMap can often be used to quickly parallelize
sequential codes or develop parallel applications from scratch. It supports all common parallel computing constructs such as virtual shared memory, distributed memory, automatic or explicit process scheduling, explicit concurrency primitives, and failure recovery of stranded processes.

by MacNN Staff