November 18, 2002–Wolfram Research, Inc. and NEC Corporation are pleased to announce the upcoming release of Mathematica 4.2 for the Itanium Linux platform. Intel’s Itanium 64-bit architecture is designed for demanding next-generation computing applications like Mathematica.

Wolfram Research and NEC are excited to be among the first players to highlight the Itanium Processor Family (IPF) on the open-source Linux platform. This combination of NEC IPF server solutions and Wolfram Research’s world-leading technical computing software takes full advantage of the potential of the IPF architecture, which is designed to deliver the highest possible performance for enterprise and technical applications.

NEC is already seeing strong demand for IPF platforms from its customers. Among the immediate benefits cited is the ability to run larger and more complex calculations than possible on current Intel 32-bit processors.

At the same time, Mathematica users who are running increasingly larger computations and applications find themselves limited by the 4-GB address ceiling in the current Intel IA-32-bit architecture. By comparison, IPF will give them one million terabytes (1 terabyte = 1,024 GB) of address space to work with. Mathematica for IPF will also be able to take full advantage of planned performance increases in future versions of the Itanium processors.

“Mathematica is already known for its ability to handle large computations on current processor platforms,” says Roger Germundsson, Director of Research and Development at Wolfram Research. “But we have a large number of both individual and institutional users whose works are very computationally intensive by nature and who are in need of ever greater capacities. We are glad to now be able to offer them a powerful Mathematica solution for a true 64-bit computing environment.”

Due to Wolfram’s rigorous quality assurance procedures, Mathematica 4.2 for Itanium Linux is initially available only for NEC systems in the Express 5800/1000 series. Wolfram Research will consider certifying Mathematica for additional IPF-based hardware depending on demand. Interest in additional platform certifications should be directed to ia64@wolfram.com. More information about features in Mathematica 4.2 is available.