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Re: Mathematica 7 is now available

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg94113] Re: Mathematica 7 is now available
  • From: Michael Weyrauch <michael.weyrauch at gmx.de>
  • Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2008 05:30:45 -0500 (EST)
  • References: <gg62p3$56g$1@smc.vnet.net> <gh8hkr$r1d$1@smc.vnet.net>
  • Reply-to: michael.weyrauch at gmx.de, jon at ffconsultancy.com

Hello,

> Parallelism is used when performance is important. In general, Mathematica
> is used when performance is largely unimportant. Consequently, they are
> almost mutually exclusive.

This is a strange statement, which I hardly understand. First of all, in 
many of my numerical calculations performance is important (e.g. solving 
large sets of coupled differential equations) and Mathematica compares 
rather well with compiled languages (in a few cases I can compare with 
compiled code which does the same calculations as my Mathematica code)

Within such calculations often linear algebra routines are used, which
where parallalized in Mathematica even before Version 7, and, of course
it makes a big difference if your Computer has just one or more 
processors available. So compared to compiled languages with programs 
that are not parallelized (which is often the case) Mathematica may even 
have an advantage.

> 
> For example, you would need to parallelize the following Mathematica program
> perfectly across 700,000 CPU cores to obtain performance comparable to the
> equivalent OCaml program:
> 
I don't know OCaml. Therefore, could you elaborate a bit how this 
tremendous difference comes about and under what conditions??

Thanks   Michael


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