SCIENCE

Nimbis Services has announced the planned formal release of their on-demand Cloud Services for Mathematica by the end of 2010. The new service for Mathematica has gone through extensive beta testing by existing Mathematica users in collaboration with Wolfram Research over the past year. Wolfram Research is the developer of the very popular line of Mathematica and gridMathematica computational applications for desktop and parallel computing platforms.

Nimbis Services' Cloud Services for Mathematica is designed to make high performance computing (HPC) more widely and easily available, including to companies of all sizes. According to Deborah Wince-Smith, president of the Council on Competitiveness, "HPC systems remain a largely underutilized competitiveness asset in the US for the majority of companies. Opening access to HPC represents a huge productivity opportunity for the nation and a competitiveness transformation challenge."

Nimbis Services' offering will enable Mathematica users with on-demand, pay-as-you-go, click-through ordering of cloud-based high performance computing services through the Nimbis Cloud Portal, a convenient, familiar, secure, and scalable Web-based storefront tailored for HPC ordering and order fulfillment. Users of Nimbis Services' new service for Mathematica will initially have access to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and R Systems HPC datacenters with additional HPC cloud providers planned in the future based on customer demand. Nimbis Services' new offering is available to anyone owning a single-user Mathematica desktop license with active Wolfram Premier Service. Users will be able to select the computing provider, configure a cluster, submit a Mathematica notebook and data files on the cluster (collectively the "job"), monitor progress of the jobs, and upload and evaluate the job results.

"The two largest challenges in using HPC are programming the HPC application itself and ensuring that you can get enough computing power to do the job," says Tom Wickham-Jones, Wolfram Research, executive director of kernel technology. "Mathematica answers the programming challenge by providing extensive built-in multicore and cluster support. Nimbis Services' Cloud Services for Mathematica offers Mathematica users low-risk access to large-scale computing capabilities. We are excited to be working with Nimbis to offer HPC access to our customers."