Maplesoft Taps HPC Horsepower for Technical Computing

Engineers looking to tap into high-performance computing(HPC) horsepower to help solve their complex mathematical problems now have anew option with the latest version of Maplesoft's Maple Grid Computing Toolbox.

The Maple 14 release of the Grid Computing Toolbox providesbuilt-in integration with Windows HPC Server, including Windows HPC Server 2008R2. The platform connects directly to a user's Windows HPC Server cluster,simplifying installation, configuration and operation of the grid. It alsointegrates with the Windows HPC Server tool chain to handle administrativetasks such as job scheduling, load balancing and usage monitoring. The Maple 14Grid Computing Toolbox also uses the standard message passing interface (MPI)protocol for efficient communication between nodes in the grid, and easyintegration with tools that support this protocol.

The Maple Grid Computing Toolbox allows users to run Maplecomputations in parallel, taking advantage of the hardware resources they haveavailable. The toolbox essentially lets engineers distribute computationsacross the nodes of a network of workstations, a supercomputer or the CPUs of amultiprocessor computer. By doing so, engineers can handle computationalproblems that were not doable on a single machine because of memory limitationsor because the workload would simply take too long.

The Grid Computing Toolbox is available in twodifferent versions: The PersonalEdition supports up to eight CPUs in the cluster while the Cluster Edition supports an unlimitednumber of CPUs in the cluster.