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Re: with a Cray

• To: mathgroup at yoda.physics.unc.edu
• Subject: Re: with a Cray
• From: Booker Bense <benseb at sdsc.edu>
• Date: Fri, 1 May 92 07:54:20 PDT

- Mathematica kernals do exist for a Cray. I doubt if one has ever
been installed at a pubically available site, the price is so
astronomical.  Also, having a Cray run mathematica is really not going
to be of much benefit, scalar codes only run at about 10 mflops on a
YMP. For the price of an Mma kernal you could buy a bunch of
decstations and just wait longer for your answer. Since much of MMa is
character oriented, the performance would probably be even worse.
The only real advantage of a Cray Kernal is access to more memory.
You'd be far better off spending money on more memory for your
decstation than attempting to run a remote kernal on a YMP. You
mention that you have access to a 432, spend the $3000 US and put
another 32 megabytes in your Decstation and up your swap partion to
about 200 megabytes. This will be far zippier than running over the
network to a remote kernal. 

- Given the caveats above, One extremely useful way to interact with a
Cray would be to construct NUMERICAL matrices in MMa and then ship
them over the network to a YMP to munch on. Here at SDSC we've
developed a couple libraries to make that kind of work simpler
you can get them by anonymous ftp to sdsc.edu . The library that
you want is libsdsc.a which contains binary I/O libraries. 

- Booker C. Bense: SDSC Consulting