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

distributed functions

[BadDoggie]

According to the Features section, it includes:

• 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.

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.

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.

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

[starseeker]

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.

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:OT: Not to be anal-retentive, but...

[BadDoggie]

From the Supported Platforms page (first link on the Specifications page):

• 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.

bah

[grub]

No matter how much horsepower I put behind Mathematica, it still gives me errors when I divide by zero. My employer didn't spend zillions of dollars on SGI Origins just to get errors. Can't Wolfram include some sort of Clippy helper? /sarcasm

Re:Yes, but...

[BabyDave]

No, but if you scale up enough, it can emulate a cellular automaton using the Universe ...

discount

[sstory]

wonder if i'll be able to get a $130 gridMathematica for Students version. :-)

sure: plenty

[g4dget]

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).

NeXT did this with Zilla a decade ago!

[mbourgon]

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.