Training in Mathematica
On Friday 13th Feb I went to Wolfram Research European Ltd in Oxfordshire for Introductory training* on Wolfram Mathematica. Although I already had some experience with Mathematica I thought that it might be better to have professional guide. Few topics included in presentation sounded very interesting, i.e. parallelisation, usage of GPU, data visualisation and dynamic modifications to formulas. As one might expect in introductory course it was a brief sweep through all possible functions, thus not much was said about mentioned points. It was useful, however, to learn about different approaches or to see what is possible in Mathematica. They provided us with executable notebooks [download below] which are quite helpful to look in for examples. Additionally, we were using Mathematica 10, which I think is much better than version 9. Most helpful is quick tool-hint pop-up with possible argument for typed command and also easier change of writing style.
For later reference, I will mention here some commands and pages:
- Parallelize is a CPU-based parallelisation. It automatically attempts to divide problem by available cores and if it determines that it is impossible it will solve it in serial.
- CUDAFunctionLoad and OpenCLFunctionLoad use GPU to execute function. With both commands user have to write code in CUDA/OpenCL, define inputs/outputs and specify blocks' dimensions.
- Tutorial on parallel tools in Mathematica.
- Demonstrations is a webpage with large number of examples. To see them online one might need to download CDF previewer.
- Examples used in presentation.