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

Does that mean....

[Anonymous Coward]

...you can run this software on a Beowulf Cluster?

Cool stuff... but I thought research labs

[f00zbll]

already have their own cluster, and grid systems? This should mean some small junior college or state college w/o tons of government research grants may be able to even the playing field. With the reduction of cost, it begins to make it easier for smaller research labs and schools to build grids. I remember assisting graduates studens prep processes so that it could be sent to UCSD's supercomputer. Now more universities will have their own system and be able to utilize their computer labs as grids at night. Atleast in theory.

Re:Cool stuff... but I thought research labs

[Lars Arvestad]

I thought research labs already have their own cluster, and grid systems?

Many do, but they are somewhat hard to utilize sometimes. For instance, in the lab I am at now, they have a well-sized cluster which in its first incarnation used double-CPU nodes. It turned out that usually, only a single CPU on each node was used. This was because the applixation that people mostly were running didn't support using more than one cpu.

In this case, it has probably (I am note a user myself) been a headache running Mathematica scripts on multiple nodes. I guess it means writing small Mathematica scripts that are then distributed across the cluster and a perl script or something collects the results and merges them. Being able to write the whole logic in one environment must be a big step forward.

One of the cooler things here though is the heterogenecy. In the organisations I have been, there have been enourmous computing power in administrative PCs running windows that no-one has been able to really take advantage of. At least without a big effort. gridMathematica may actually provide an easy way of tapping into that resource.

question : OSS/free project in this space

[wfmcwalter]

Is there an open-source or free-software product in the Mathematica / Matlab / Maple etc. space ?

How to the free solutions, if they exist, compare with their (darned expensive) commercial bretheren in general, and in particular is there anything like grid support?

Re:question : OSS/free project in this space

[bezza]

There is no reason why a Matlab clone couldn't be made (it is just a interpreter with some built in numerical functions that have already been developed). Anyone can write functions to evaluate expressions numerically.

Maple on the other hand is the most amazing piece of software I have ever used because of its ability to deal with variables etc exactly like a human can. I am studying for my finals right now and I use it to do some of the more tedious work so my study is more efficient. Calculating the exponential of a matrix is tedious at best but Maple does it with ease. I don't believe a product like this could be made in the open-source evironment...a massive amount of research would have to be undertaken and this would require a heap of money, as no methodology could be taken from the Maple team itself.

I am not trolling but the open-source community is much better at creating a (usually better) alternative to existing software with an obvious algorithm or method rather than investing money into computing theory like a clone of Maple would need.

A similar example would be linux desktops...take KDE or Gnome...great desktops, but most ideas have been taken from either Windows or the Mac OS'es, who have sunk millions of dollars into market research.

As I said, I am not trolling, and am open to be proven wrong. Prior similar examples etc.?

Students

[Omkar]

Although this would be expensive, couldn't Wolfram set up a subscription service? Students who need temporary access to the power of Mathematica (I'm thinking of doctoral theses) could but computing time.

On an unrelated note, Integrals.com is one of the most useful high school math sites ever (up with Ask Dr. Math. It ended two weeks of misery by telling integral(sqrt(1+x^-4)dx) is not an elementary function.

Re:distributed functions

[orcaaa]

Actually, Mathematica, in the GUI mode, has a lot of processing overheads. And performing complex calculations can take a while. I use Mathematica regularly, and a class assignment took me 6 hours to "compile" on Mathematica. (It was about modelling proteins and showing how they evolve with time). If it indeed takes such time, then this kind of grid computing can be a boon. I can see this being used a lot in the Universities, where usually, there are a large number of computers not being used simultaneously.

Re:I've used this..

[orcaaa]

First of all, what are u referring to when u say that u have used "this". Is this Mathematica or gridMathematica? I am assuming its mathematica. In that case, I would say that u are highly mislead or have not used the product in a long time. I have used all three, and have found Mathematica most suitable for the kind of work I do, namely, sybolic manipulation. Matlab, on the other hand, is excellent for number crunching. Claiming that one is better that the other is a statement similar to saying Redhat is better that Debian .... or something similar.
While Matlab is more efficient, Mathematica, certainly, has a more usable interface(more eyecandy - which is responsible for slowing it down a bit).
While talking about functionality, i have found that Mathematica is the most functional amongst all, for me, with a very large number of inbuilt functions that do the job extremely well.(here come the flames). Also the unix version actually works more efficiently on my system than windows.
I dont know where are u pulling those numbers out of. But it seems u just made them up.

random thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a shame that Mathematica is so expensive, and so slow for numerical calculations -- it is great for prototyping and tinkering, but lousy for serious computations compared to code written in C(++) or Fortran.

I have love/hate relationship with Mathematica -- I have used it for years, and have writtens lots of purpose-built programs in it to support my research, but this "legacy" code makes it hard for me to switch to anything else.

Consequently, I am forced to pay Wolfram's industry-leading prices for the program and put up with their slow-as-molasses approach to bug fixing. For instance, a set of hypergeometric integrals were broken for at least 18 months, and it seriously screwed up the work of at least one colleauge of mine -- and if the source was available we could have fixed it ourselves.
Consequently, I would love to see (and would be keen to contribute to) an open source clone of Mathematica, or at least something that could parse mathematica code into a form understandable by an open source package like Maxima.

However given Wolfram's trigger happy approach to lawsuits I rate the chances of this succeeding to be fairly small -- which is ironic, since Wolfram's recent book fails to acknowledge a lot of prior art, and he was successfully sued by his co-investors for essentially asset-stripping his own company in the early nineties.

Ah well. Back to work.

Capitalize on the hype

[pridkett]

It seems like this attempt to market something as "gridMathematica" is really a little deceiving. In reality it is more distributed Mathematica. Grids involve virtual organizations, authentication, etc. For more information see Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman, and Steve Tuecke's paper The Anatomy of the Grid.

There are other packages which do very similar things and have a for a long time, such as NetSolve and Ninf which allow you to do cool stuff with most any application that needs computational power.

There is also a Commodity Grid Kit (standard interface to Globus services) for Matlab that should be out soon, more info can be found here.

So for now, I'll just consider this more someone wanting to capitalize on the hype around Grids at SC2002 than anything else. Unless I'm missing something obvious.