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.

Comments

I've used this..

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used this. Unfortunately it only has around 70% of the functionality of other packages such as matlab and of those functions it has, only around 50% of them are of a decent usable quality. The performance of the Unix version is also rather poor, being around 60% that of the Windows version.

The main problem is LICENSING

[jki]

The company I work for has some competence in grid computing, and we have a platform that we have tailored for some customers. There would be a gazillion of END-USER companies interested in utilizing grid/meta computing but a high percent of them are faced by the same problem: LICENSING methods which do not take the need for gridcomputing in account. Even if a computer only works as a processing slave providing computational resources, for many types of software from many vendors the end-user company still needs to purchase similar licenses as when all the features of the software are used. This makes integrating existing software with a gridsolution just to enhance performance less favorable than buying huge amount of memory and CPU power for a single node: because then they survive with less license costs. A license for such software can today cost $20 000 per license for example. In my opinion, this practise should be changed and maybe the end-users should combine forces to make these changes happen and put some pressure on the software vendors. There are cases where companies could do their simulations hundreds of times quicker if they could just afford the licenses.

It is good that atleast mathematica has altered their licensing methods a bit. Maybe this licensing scheme could be used also when utilizing mathematica over 3rd party grid architecture. If someone from Mathematica is listening, I don't mind you contacting me. :)

Re:question : OSS/free project in this space

[bcrowell]

Can you imagine if someone invented a computer language that was 100% proprietary, and there was only one vendor for the interpreter? How many Slashdotters would use it? Well, that's what Mathematica is.

Wolfram recently wrote a book claiming that he could explain the whole universe using cellular automata. The problem is that it's all expressed in Mathematica's notation, so at least one reviewer I know of ended up saying essentially, "It looks like crap, but I don't feel like learning a proprietary computer language just so I can check out all the details."

My personal experience with Wolfram has been a pretty good example of the abusive relationships you can get into with proprietary software vendors who have no morals. I paid for a copy of Mathematica, which stopped working when I upgraded to MacOS 8. Tech support's reply was that if I wanted to keep running Mathematica, I could pay for an upgrade to a newer version of Mathematica.

Stuff like this makes me really grateful for Maxima.