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

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. :)