Mathematica 7 Integrates 500+ New Functions, 12 New Application Areas

By DE Editors

Wolfram Research (Champaign, IL) announced Mathematica 7, a major release that accelerates the drive to integrate and automate functionality as core Mathematica capabilities, adding image processing, parallel high-performance computing (HPC), new on-demand curated data, and other recently developed computational innovations — in total over 500 new functions and 12 application areas.

Image processing is one key integrated addition. Industrial-strength,  high-performance functions for image composition, transformation, enhancement,  and segmentation combine with the existing Mathematica infrastructure of high-level language, automated interface construction, interactive notebook documents, and computational power to create a uniquely versatile image processing solution.

Built-in parallel computing is another key new area of integration in Mathematica 7 (and a first across technical computing). For the first time, every copy of Mathematica (as well as the Mathematica Player Pro 7 deployment platform) now comes standard with the technology to parallelize computations over multiple cores or over networks of Mathematica deployed across a grid. Every copy of Mathematica 7 comes with four computation processes included. More processes as well as network capabilities can be added.

Parallel computing is an important next step in increasing technical computing performance because all computers are becoming multicore.

Mathematica’s parallel computation is typically accessed in two easy ways —  automatically by certain built-in functions and by users applying the Parallelize superfunction to their own code or computations. Mathematica automatically distributes the tasks over the available processes, optimizing for the installed hardware.

Integrating parallel technology has a number of key advantages over making it an add-on. In particular, it enables software developers to rely on their clients using parallel-enabled Mathematica or Player Pro.

Mathematica 7 is available for Windows 2000/XP/Vista, Mac OS X, Linux x86, Solaris UltraSPARC/x86, and compatible systems.

For other areas of innovation in Mathematica 7, visit Wolfram Research.

Also, at SC08 in Austin, TX, last week, Wolfram Research demonstrated a new version of Mathematica, which integrates CUDA , NVIDIA’s parallel GPU computing architecture and is expected to give Mathematica users an unprecedented performance increase of 10-100X in numerical computing, modeling, simulation and visual computations, without the need to learn or write C code. The demonstration of the CUDA-accelerated release of Mathematica coincides with the launch of the NVIDIA Tesla Personal Supercomputer at this year’s SC08. The CUDA accelerated version of Mathematica is expected to be available in Q1 2009.

For more information on Mathematica,  and the NVIDIA Tesla Personal Supercomputer, please visit NVIDIA.

Sources:  Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.