Wolfram Research has released Mathematica 7, an update 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.
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 versatile image processing solution,
says Stephen Wolfram, president and CEO of Wolfram Research.
Built-in parallel computing is another key new area of integration in
Mathematica 7 (and a first across technical computing), he adds. 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 easily.
Mathematica’s parallel computation is typically accessed in two 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, Wolfram says. In particular, it enables software
developers to rely on their clients using parallel-enabled
Mathematica or Player Pro.
Computable data sources, introduced in Mathematica 6, are unique and
popular innovations because of the ease with which data can be
utilized in Mathematica, says Wolfram. Mathematica 7 builds on this
with major additions including the complete human genome, weather,
astronomical, GIS, and geodesy data. E
Mathematica 7 is available for Mac OS X, Windows 2000/XP/Vista, Linux
x86, Solaris UltraSPARC/x86, and compatible systems. More product
details are available on the Mathematica web site:
http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica