Wolfram Research has released gridMathematica 1.1, an update of the parallel computing solution for dedicated grids or clusters. The new version includes Mathematica 5, Wolfram’s technical computing software.
Mathematica allows complex calculations to be carried out on single-processor machines, but gridMathematica can tackle much larger computations using clusters, multiprocessor machines and computing grids. Typical uses include bioinformatics applications, processing and analysis of large data sets, data mining and large computations in physics, mathematics, and the life sciences.
gridMathematica 1.1 exploits the faster TCP/IP connectivity in Mathematica 5, providing faster communication speed. Wolfram Research says that on most standard networks this means that users will see bandwidth improvements of a factor of 10 and latency improvements of a factor of 200; on faster networks the gains are purportedly even higher.
The update of gridMathematica also delivers performance gains in dense numerical linear algebra, support for sparse numerical linear algebra, large-scale linear programming, arbitrary precision computation and interprocess communication speed.
gridMathematica can run on any cluster of machines, including Mac OS X, Unix, Linux, and Windows; it requires only TCP/IP connectivity. It’s sold in increments, with each increment consisting of eight nodes. Contact Wolfram Research for configurations and pricing.