Wolfram Research on Monday released Mathematica Personal Grid Edition, a new version of the technical computing software built for quad-core computers, including Appleis Quad-Core Power Mac G5. The application enables on the desktop the kind of parallel computing typically found in high-cost supercomputers.
Mathematica Personal Grid Edition features adaptive load balancing, a user-programmable schedule for problem-specific adaptation, automatic failure recovery and reassignment of stranded processors, support for tracing and debugging and speculative parallelization for nondeterministic problems. Wolfram said that the software features performance improvements of up to 300% over the standard version of Mathematica.
Pricing is US$3,945, with academic pricing set at $1,840. Volume discounts are available. Mac OS X v10.2 or higher and a G3 or better processor is required. Mac OS X v10.4 and a G5 processor are required for the 64-bit version of Mathematica.