Mathematica integrates over 500 new functions
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Nov 19, 2008 at 8:00pm
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.
Mathematica 7 is available for Mac OS X, Windows 2000/XP/Vista, Linux x86, Solaris UltraSPARC/x86, and compatible systems. More product details, including pricing and upgrade options, are available on the Mathematica web site.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
