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Supercomputing Engine for Mathematica

Video of presentation given at the Wolfram Technology Conference 2006

 

 
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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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