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The new Supercomputing Engine for Mathematica (formerly known as the PoochMPI Toolkit) enables Wolfram Research's
Mathematica to be combined with the easy-to-use,
supercomputer-compatible Pooch clustering technology of Dauger Research.
This fusion applies the parallel computing paradigm of today's
supercomputers and the ease-of-use of Pooch to Mathematica, enabling
possibilities none of these technologies could do alone.
Closely following the supercomputing industry-standard Message-Passing
Interface (MPI), the Supercomputing Engine creates a standard way for every
Mathematica kernel in the cluster to communicate with each other
directly. In contrast to typical grid implementations that are solely
master-slave or server-client, this solution instead has all kernels
communicate with each other directly and collectively the way modern
supercomputers do.
As they do for other cluster applications, Pooch and MacMPI provide the
support infrastructure to enable this supercomputing-style parallel
startup and inter-kernel communication. After locating, launching, and
coordinating Mathematica kernels on a cluster, the Supercomputing Engine
creates and supports an "all-to-all" communication topology, which
high-performance computing practitioners find necessary to address the
largest problems in scientific computing since the earliest large
supercomputers, all within the Mathematica computing environment.
By truly running Mathematica in parallel, its power can be combined with
Pooch's ease of use and reliability in high-performance computing.
This
new technology, as Pooch has done before, will further enhance the power
of both clusters and Mathematica for its users.
Shot "live to tape", this is a video of the presentation given at the
Wolfram Technology Conference 2006 in Champaign, Illinois.
It introduces the inspiration of the Supercomputing Engine and demonstrates how
it makes use of an Xserve cluster at Advanced Cluster System's facilities in Irvine, California.
Other online versions are available.
Download the Slides (PDF)
Compressed for online distribution using the Pooch QuickTime Exporter.
Dauger Research, Inc. makes high-performance computation and visualization easy
to use and accessible to users. Our
award-winning team, to better accomplish
our scientific goals,
reinvented the cluster computer in 1998, pioneering
easy-to-use, high-performance clusters. Dauger Research, Inc., is committed to
bridging the divides between the scientifically and technically complex and the
mainstream.
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