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gridMathematica Announced
simpl3x writes "Mathematica for grids was announced at Comdex. It offers support for the usual platforms--Windows, OS X, Linux, and Unix--and offers the ability to use heterogeneous OSes. I haven't used the product in years, but cool nonetheless. Does an off-the-shelf software package, which is scalable as this is provide competition to custom packages--is it easier to add machines than develop custom programs?" And just when you thought Comdex was good and dead.
- Support for multiprocessor machines, heterogeneous networks, LAN, and WAN
- Support for scheduling of virtual processes or explicit distribution to available processors
- Support for virtual shared memory
- Support for synchronization, locking, and latency hiding
It looks like they took a few pages from the various distributed projects (United Devices, distributed.net). I can see this being used for universities and some research and scientific institutions, but still, with processor power today, even Mathematica representations of 10-dimensional Calabi-Yau spaces can be rendered in minutes.woof.
- Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP
- Mac OS X
- Mac OS 8.1 or later
- Linux (Redhat 7.1 or equivalent) or later
- PowerPC Linux (Yellow Dog 2.1 equivalent or later)
- AlphaLinux (Redhat 6.2 or equivalent) or later
- Solaris 8 or later
- Compaq Tru64 Unix 5.1 or later
- HP-RISC HP-UX 11.00 or later
- IBM RS/6000 AIX 5.1 or later
- SGI IRIX 6.2 or later
If the call is for "Redhat 7.1 or equivalent", I can't think of any reason that a distro with kernel 2.4.2 or later wouldn't work.woof.
Probably the most advanced open source project competing with Mathematica et. al. is Maxima. It's a spinoff of Macsyma, which was the first symbolic integrator. Originally developed by MIT, it's got a lot of features the other programs have, and a few they don't. It's got some bugs, but is under very active development.
It's major weaknesses currently are in the GUI and documentation department. TeXmacs can do a decent job of providing a nice interface, but it still won't measure up to Mathematica, which can handle 2D input and output. The default interface is a Tcl/Tk program, which is OK but pretty basic. My prefered way to use Maxima is through emacs - it has a very good emacs mode called emaxima.
As far as grid support goes I'm not aware of anything. The project isn't really to that stage - it's currently working towards a stable 6.0 release which fixes all known mathematical bugs. Then comes feature extensions and new GUI work. That would probably be the point to start thinking about grid support - basically someone would have to decide they wanted it enough to impliment it. The usual open source thing.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Hi, you can always checkout octave which is provides a convenient command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with Matlab.
It is not uncommon to find a cluster of networked computers acting as a distributed system. They are usually implemented using things like MPI or other message passing protocols. The programs tend to be written "in house" and are generally written for specific applications.
Grid Mathematica is different because it is a commerical application, can be used for general problems, and is used for symbolic computations. This makes it much easier to implement an algorithm on a distributed platform. The results may take longer than a program written specifically for a particular application, but distributed environments can be exploited by many more people with this product.
You can get a copy of Numerical Python and run PyPVM or PyMPI with it for distributed computing.
I think for numerical computation, that's technically actually a better environment than Mathematica. And, while I'm not usually one to harp on the fact that free software also doesn't cost money, given the steep price of Mathematica, in this case, the money saving aspect really does matter as we..
Cool. What I really want to have is a distributed solver for dynamic simulations. But a dream scenario would be to do the setup, pre- and postprocessing in any simulation program (like ADAMS, LMS or even block-scheme based like EASY5 or AMESIM or good old Simulink). For the solving part, however, I'd like to just export the equation sets (implicit or explicit) and let a distributed solver take care of this. As I understand, it could be possible to use the Mathematica solver as it exists today. Maybe not very efficiently though, but this could be compensated by quantity. I would love to install such baby in our company...
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
For interactive symbolic manipulation, Maxima is an excellent open-source alternative. For numerical applications, Numerical Python and its associated packages beat both Matlab and Mathematica in my opinion. For 3D visualization, you can get VTK, which also has Python bindings.
Maxima is also used occasionally as a rapid prototyping language, but it's proprietary and it has a lot of rough edges. You are probably better off using one of a number of open languages with similar features, like Scheme, OCAML, SML, Prolog, or Haskell.
Don't forget about C++, however. In many ways, C++ nowadays allows you to write numerical code more naturally than any of these other languages (yes, better than Matlab and Mathematica), it has by far the best libraries available for it, and it gives you excellent performance. And you can even do symbolic mathematics in C++, with the right libraries (though it's not interactive, of course).
If you don't like the current gnuplot you might want to try cvs. The pm3d mode makes 3D plots look much nicer, and cvs also allows interactive rotation of 3D plots with the mouse (in Linux, anyway. These features haven't been translated to Windows as far as I know.)
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
At Texas A&M, one of the local CS students was doing his Thesis on some sort of large math problem in HRBB. He had two choices for writing the code to provide the solution. He could either write it in Fortran and use the Cray Y-MP we had (which, 10 years ago, was a fairly big deal). OR, he could use a high level language and use Zilla and our NeXT lab to solve it. He chose the second.
Amazing to see - you'd tell the Cubes to run Zilla in the background, feed it the problem, and away you go. We had 6 computers in the lab, and you could tell he was working on it when you first logged in - it would be a bit sluggish. IIRC, he later took over the NeXT lab downstairs, which had 30 NeXT "pizza boxes". Not bad, especially for 1991-1992.
And this paper says:
Parallelization: with a NeXTstep application called Zilla, multiple Mathematica sessions may be invoked on networks of NeXT computers to allow the simultaneous solution of different parts of a large problem.
BTW: anyone happen to know if they're doing Zilla on OS X? I remember reading something about an easy way to cluster Macs for performance, but I forget the details. It just involved running a client on each workstation.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Sorry to reply to my own post, but one thing I should add - while I don't know quite how this relates to grid support per say, there is a lisp interface to the pvm library at http://www.symbolicnet.org/ftpsoftware/cl-pvm/ which help with getting Maxima to do this stuff.
It is free for noncommercial use - I imagine you could contact the authors to discuss other uses.
Part of the readme:
The CL-PVM package consists of a set of Common Lisp functions that interfaces Common Lisp (KCL, AKCL, or GCL) to the C-based library of PVM. Generally, there is one CL interface function to each PVM C library function. The CL function calls its C-based counter part and relays data to and from the C function. This interface is complete and allows Lisp-based programs to take part in a PVM arrangement and thus facilitates the combination of symbolic, numeric, graphics, and other useful systems in a distributed fashion.
CL-PVM also offers a set of tools to help use it effectively with Lisp and MAXIMA tasks. Documentation, on-line manual pages, and examples are also included.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
The compiler Aldor for Axiom is available for download. Axiom was developed at a number of places, including IBM, and it being released as open-source is something that has only been finalized in the last couple of months, so the distribution is just beginning to be more widely available.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
I haven't seen this being suggested here yet, but R for statistical computing (link) (GNU 'S') is not only open-source, but also used a lot in several scientific fields, such as statistics and machine learning (books have accompanying source code in R). It has loads of packages which allows you to do all kinds of stuff.
... besides Octave you might try the Euro-centric Scilab (http://www-rocq.inria.fr/scilab/). It is very close to Matlab in abilities, already has provision for parallel processing (via PVM), and has a _very_ supportive user group.
Honestly though, I've tried just about everything that's out there in OSS. You can cobble together things with C++ libraries, Python/NumPy, etc. But you pay big bucks because the commercial software brings it together seamlessly and, generally, mindlessly.
Case in point: I got some biochem students running FFT's and principal component analysis w/graphic output in less than half an hour (using Matlab). Didn't have to explain about syntax, wrappers, bindings, etc. Just fft(...) and plot(...). That's worth $1000 because it got them interested. When their problems get more complex than Matlab can handle simply, they'll _want_ to learn the other stuff.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Well, the three big maths/numerics platforms (Mathematica, Matlab and Maple) are all available for Linux, but you do, of course, have to pay for them :-)
I think the moral of the story here is that not all Linux software is free (either in cost, or in Freedom). And that's OK.
There are many companies that *sell* products or services who are putting a lot of money (read time, testing, development, advocacy etc.) into the open source community, and this will only continue if they make money from the community.
Of course, we'd all love it if we could get math/numerical software of the calibre of the above systems for free, but the truth is that we can't (yet).
There are a couple of open source equivalents (Octave and Maxima are two exaples), but their quality is far from that of the above products.
(That is not to say that all open source software is of lesser quality than 'commercial' software.)
One of the great things about the open source community is that there is a lot of great software that is free (in both senses), but there is (increasingly) a range of 'commercial' software that is available.
So one can be a casual user of Octave and get by without paying for an expensive license, but for those of us who need a product of a higher quality, with printed manuals and technical support (etc.), it is great that this software is available if we want to spend our money on it. And, of course, that we have a broad range of choices.
"The noble art of losing face will one day save the human race"---Hans Blix
Fear not! Computers were made to crunch numbers - there's always a good chance someone's doing just that =)
I'm not a mathematician... but I've tried a few math apps here and there. Octave + Gnuplot (people aready mentioned this), and Euler (I particularly like this thing's "workbook" approach... Save all notes in your session to a file, load it back, and fully edit everything in your command history! Way cool.