Supercomputing Engine for Mathematica from Wolfram

By DE Editors

New from Wolfram Research (Champaign, IL) is SEM (Supercomputing Engine for Mathematica), a new third-party application package for gridMathematica and Mathematica Personal Grid Edition, which creates a standard way for each Mathematica kernel in the cluster to communicate directly with every other kernel. It makes Mathematica supercomputing at your desktop simple.

In contrast to typical grid implementations that are solely master-slave or server-client, all kernels communicate collectively in this solution by closely following the supercomputing industry-standard, Message-Passing Interface (MPI), and The Open MPI Project.

As a result of the collaboration between Advanced Cluster Systems, LLC and Dauger Research, Inc., SEM enables Mathematica to be combined with Dauger Research’s Pooch clustering technology. This fusion applies the parallel computing paradigm of today’s supercomputers and Pooch technology to Mathematica.

Key features of SEM offers ease of programming parallel algorithms; parallel scalability by using Mathematica and SEM; less execution time needed for Mathematica algorithms; maximum use of resources in multi-CPU machines;  symbolic manipulations across a cluster; and distributed memory model for using the RAM of the entire cluster to run memory-consuming applications.

As they do for other cluster applications, Pooch and Open MPI provide the support infrastructure to enable this supercomputing-style, parallel start-up, and inter-kernel communication. After locating, launching, and coordinating Mathematica kernels on a cluster, SEM creates and supports an “all-to-all” communication topology, which high-performance computing practitioners find necessary to address large problems in scientific computing,  all within the Mathematica computing environment.

SEM also provides an API that closely follows the MPI standard appropriate for use in Mathematica. By enabling Mathematica kernels to be harnessed together in the manner that supercomputers are, the company release says that Mathematica,  Pooch, and Open MPI embark on a new approach to handling supercomputing challenges.

For more details about SEM 1.0.2, which requires gridMathematica 2.2 or Mathematica Personal Grid Edition 6 and is available for Mac OS X 10.4.11 and up, is available from Wolfram Research.

Sources:  Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.