Mathematica for Intel® Itanium® 2
Platform Unites High-Performance Technologies
October 14, 2003--A close collaboration between Wolfram Research, Inc. and
Intel Corporation has fused Intel Itanium 2
architecture with Wolfram
Research's industry-leading software for high performance technical and
scientific computation. The result is
Mathematica 5 for Linux on the Intel
Itanium processor family, which is now immediately downloadable upon purchase
from the Wolfram Research web store. This makes Mathematica the first technical
computing system to be made available for the Intel Itanium 2-based platform,
which Intel has cast as the future of high-end computing environments.
"We are very pleased to see Mathematica supporting the Intel Itanium processor family,"
said Richard Wirt, Intel Senior Fellow and General Manager of Intel's Software and
Solutions Group. "Mathematica is very popular among users in the
high performance
computing market segment. Using the Intel C++ compiler and our highly optimized Math
Kernel Library, Wolfram has produced a release of Mathematica that demonstrates the
benefits of using the Intel Itanium 2 processor for high performance
computing."
Mathematica--and Version 5,
in particular, with its unparalleled speed, scope, and scalability for
computationally intensive tasks--is an ideal fit for Intel Itanium 2-based platforms.
"One of the key features of Mathematica 5 is
the use of fast, advanced algorithms for dense linear algebra and
arbitrary-precision computation, and we made sure that those algorithms take
full advantage of the Intel Itanium 2's microprocessor architecture," said
Peter Overmann, Director of Software Technology at Wolfram Research.
Mathematica's implementation of arbitrary-precision numerics makes
Mathematica unique
among technical computing systems in its ability to truly gain performance on
64-bit platforms. "With Mathematica 5, a whole range of calculations runs
faster, and at a higher precision if desired, in a 64-bit environment. Other
computing systems, including programming languages like Fortran, do not offer
this advantage. Combined with the obvious benefits of the increased address
space, 64-bit Mathematica is the ideal system for large-scale scientific and
technical computations," continued Overmann, whose team has invested months of
serious effort into the optimization of Mathematica for the Intel Itanium 2
processor. "The completion of the Itanium port means that there is now a native
64-bit version of Mathematica for all major Linux and Unix platforms."
Wolfram Research has also released an update to
gridMathematica, its
high performance parallel version of Mathematica, which is fully
compatible
with the Itanium platform. Version 1.1 of gridMathematica is equally suited
for clusters of Intel Itanium 2-based servers and large multiprocessor
configurations such as Hewlett-Packard's Integrity servers, which currently
can consist of up to 64 parallel Intel Itanium 2 CPUs. Typical uses of
gridMathematica include bioinformatics applications, processing and analysis
of large data sets, data mining, and large computations in physics,
mathematics, and the life sciences.
Powerhouse applications such as Mathematica and gridMathematica
are a strong draw for users who have intensive computing demands and need to be able
to solve ever larger problems. "The outstanding performance of the Itanium
technology in
HP Integrity servers plays an important role in our strategy for offering
high performance computing environments," says Winston Prather, Vice
President of the HP High Performance Technical Computing Division.
"Mathematica
on Integrity servers is the kind of solution our users rely on for their
high-level computing operations."
More information about Mathematica 5
is available.
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