March 18, 2009–Less than six months ago, Wolfram Research brought parallel computing into the mainstream by integrating automatic parallel technology into Mathematica 7. Today, that power can be multiplied by more powerful hardware and clusters with the release of gridMathematica 7.

gridMathematica extends the built-in parallelization features of Mathematica by adding extra computation kernels and automated network distribution tools–allowing users to run more tasks in parallel, over more CPUs, for faster execution without changing a line of code.

“Most of our users have access to more than one computer,” said Tom Wickham-Jones, Director of Kernel Technology at Wolfram Research. “Now, they can apply the power of all of those CPUs to a single task.”

gridMathematica‘s new powerful extension technology makes massively parallel tasks, even personal supercomputing, easy. Whether computations are distributed over local or remote CPUs, process coordination and management is completely automated.

• gridMathematica Local adds four more computation kernels to the four already included in a single-machine Mathematica license–making it ideal for the individual user who needs a boost of power on a multicore machine.
• gridMathematica Server provides a network-managed pool of computation kernels that can be shared by a group of Mathematica users locally or run on remote hardware to combine the power of multiple computers.
• Wolfram Lightweight Grid Manager makes it easy for users to acquire and run Mathematica computation kernels on remote hardware and can be used to control high-performance clusters or create ad hoc grids from idle computers.

Using gridMathematica 7, users can automatically scale up their tasks to grids of any size–allowing them to deliver accurate solutions even faster. And Wolfram Research’s longstanding relationships with high-performance-computing vendors ensure that gridMathematica is consistently optimized for the latest grid hardware and software.

“Mathematica 7 made parallel programming mainstream,” said Wickham-Jones. “Now gridMathematica makes massively parallel programming equally accessible.”

gridMathematica requires Mathematica and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Solaris. More details about gridMathematica are online.