Mathematica Personal Grid

The Personal Grid Edition of Mathematica combines 4 Mathematica kernels, a front end, and Toolkit for Parallel Computing. The master kernel handles all input, output, and scheduling, and is controlled from the front end. The computation kernels receive commands from the master kernel.

The Parallel Computing Toolkit comprises of numerous high-level parallel commands (e.g., ParallelEvaluate, ParallelMap, ParallelTable, ...etc), automatic or user-programmable load-balancing scheduling for problem-specific adaptation, Error recovery from stranded processes as well as tracing and debugging as well as speculative parallelization for nondeterministic problems.

With Mathematica Personal Grid Edition and new cost-effective quad-core computers, personal supercomputing is now available at our desktop. This special Mathematica Edition eliminates the barriers to using parallelism as part of your daily workflow, with no administrative overhead and no contending for shared resources, and opens the door to new possibilities in high-performance computing. You can easily tackle larger problems and investigate parallel
approaches at any stage of the problem-solving process.

For more details, visit Wolfram's Mathematica Personal Grid website.

Pythagorus Award to Witten

Edward Witten has won the "Pythagoras" international prize for mathematics, organised by Crotone's local council [Crotone in southern Italy is the place where Pythagorus settled down in the latter part of his life and founded a movement with religious, political and philosophical goals].

Witten was awarded the prize today at the end of a ceremony at Crotone. Edward Witten is a professor at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and is considered by many the most innovative theoretical physicist of our times. He conducted extensive researches in a number of fields, such as: general relativity, high-energy physics, String theory and mathematical physics. Witten was also awarded the Fields Medal in 1990.

To know more about Witten, the best place to visit is Witten's homepage.

Numerical Algorithm Standard

The industry for mathematical software has been lacking a unified and standardised policy for a long time. Now, people involved in making and using these softwares are coming together to formulate a consistent policy for numerical programming.

The Numerical Mathematics Consortium (Waterloo, Canada; Cambridge, MA; and Austin, TX) recently announced that mathematics software suppliers and individuals from industry and academia are working together to define a consistent and manageable foundation for numerical programming. The organisation is committed to establishing an open mathematical semantics standard for numerical algorithm development to enable portability and reuse among tools, platforms and disciplines.

Numerical Mathematics Consortium founding members include INRIA (Scilab Publisher), Maplesoft, Mathsoft and National Instruments. Also some individuals from industry and academia act as advisers. For further details visit www.nmconsortium.org.