gridMathematica
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| Developer(s) | Wolfram Research |
|---|---|
| Operating system | Cross-platform (list) |
| Type | Parallel computation |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | gridMathematica homepage |
gridMathematica is a product sold by Wolfram Research which is based on its main product Mathematica. gridMathematica has additional features which allow a cluster of computers to work in parallel to solve some types of problems in less time than would be possible using just one computer. One front end is used to communicate with multiple kernels, which actually perform the computations.The computers do not need to run the same operating systems.
gridMathematica consists of three components: A controlling Mathematica process which includes the standard Mathematica Front End which distributes tasks, eight worker Mathematica kernels which perform the distributed computations and the Parallel Computing Toolkit developed by Roman Maeder, one of the original authors of Mathematica, which manages interprocess communication such as queueing, virtual shared memory, and failure recovery.
gridMathematica scales to larger grid systems with purchases of additional units of eight processes. Worker processes can be located on a single multi processor computer or distributed over a remote heterogenious network. The communication between the kernels and the front end uses the Mathlink interface, which is an interface designed to allow external programs to communicate with Mathematica. The communication is over TCP/IP and would use SSH or RSH for authentication.
A very similar product is Mathematica Personal Grid Edition. It differs in three ways from gridMathematica:
- All processes must run on the same computer.
- Only 5 kernel licences are provided, four of which are intended to be used for computations and one for housekeeping. (With some careful programming all 5 could be used for computations, but that is not intended).
- The pool of workers cannot be extended.
There is a free seminar delivered over the web describing examples of how to use gridMathematica or Mathematica Personal Grid Edition.
See also
External links
- gridMathematica offers parallel computing solution by Dennis Sellers, MacWorld, November 20, 2002.
- An interview with Schoeller Porter, Senior Software Engineer at Wolfram Research by Ken Farmer, WinHPC.org, Monday October 30 2006.
- Felix Grant tests out some of Wolfram's spin-off products, which aim to push the company into new markets, Scientific Computing World, June 2003.
- Exploration of the capabilities of gridMathematica on the Altix ia64 HPC machines, University of Queensland VisLab.
- Special Projects: An Evaluation of Modified Newtonian Dynamics by Simulation in a Parallel Computing Environment, Furman University Physics Department.
- GridMathematika / Benchmark Tests by M.Karbalai, H.Schönau, 9/14/2006.
- Getting on the Grid, by Jean Thilmany, Mechanical Engineering, 2003.
- a real-time monitor of gridMathematica's usage on the TSUBAME supercomputer in Japan
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