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Personal Supercomputing Arrives with Mathematica Personal Grid Edition and Quad-Core Computers

Published November 14, 2005

November 14, 2005–With Mathematica Personal Grid Edition and new cost-effective quad-core computers, personal supercomputing is now a reality. Mathematica Personal Grid Edition eliminates the barriers to using parallelism as part of your daily workflow–with no administrative overhead and no contending for shared resources–and opens the door to new possibilities in high-performance computing. You can easily tackle larger problems and investigate parallel approaches at any stage of the problem-solving process, right at your desk and at your own convenience.

Mathematica Personal Grid Edition combines the computational capabilities of Mathematica with high-level parallel language extensions to create an optimal computing framework for quad-core machines, instantly changing the supercomputing landscape. Mathematica‘s high-level language and state-of-the-art numeric and symbolic solvers make it ideal for doing exploratory technical computing in a wide range of fields, resulting in increased productivity and letting you push the limits further than ever before.

The Mathematica 5 series (5.0, 5.1, 5.2) provided numerous performance and scalability enhancements to the software of choice for demanding technical computing applications. All-platform 64-bit computing has broken the memory barrier, while fast machine-optimized dense and sparse linear algebra gives Mathematica unparalleled numerical speed. These versions also incorporate major new functionality for connectivity–including built-in universal database link, web services, and numerous file format converters–as well as hundreds of new numerical and symbolic algorithms.

gridMathematica extends this high-level framework to enterprise parallel computing. Now Mathematica Personal Grid Edition is the only solution to bring high-performance supercomputing to the individual desk, continuing the Wolfram Research commitment to cutting-edge innovation.

“Traditionally, parallel computing has been the realm of specialist programmers with limited understanding of different application fields. Researchers had to cross multiple barriers–including prohibitive cost, administrative overhead, remote locations, and hard-to-use APIs–to perform parallel computations, often putting this resource beyond their reach,” said Roger Germundsson, director of research and development at Wolfram Research. “Now parallel computing can directly be used by individual researchers as an integral problem-solving method. With Mathematica Personal Grid Edition and a quad-core machine, you have an immediately useable environment for exploring parallelism at any level.”

Mathematica Personal Grid Edition offers performance improvements of up to 300% over standard Mathematica with only minimal code modifications. For more-intensive parallel applications, programs can run unchanged on grids or clusters of any size using gridMathematica. This also makes Mathematica Personal Grid Edition the perfect prototyping environment for large-scale parallelism, and adds another dimension to Wolfram Research’s ability to conveniently handle all of your supercomputing needs within the same basic framework.

Mathematica Personal Grid Edition is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Unix, for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

More details are available on the Mathematica Personal Grid Edition website.