Mathematica: A System of Computer Programs

TL;DR

This paper explains how to use Mathematica for efficient programming, including linking external programs, running background jobs, and parallelizing computations across networks, enhancing computational speed and efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces methods for integrating external programs, background execution, and parallel processing in Mathematica, applicable across different versions and operating systems.

Findings

Efficient linking of external programs with Mathematica.

Background job execution techniques for long computations.

Parallelization of computations across networked computers.

Abstract

Starting from the basic level of mathematica here we illustrate how to use a mathematica notebook and write a program in the notebook. Next, we investigate elaborately the way of linking of external programs with mathematica, so-called the mathlink operation. Using this technique we can run very tedious jobs quite efficiently, and the operations become extremely fast. Sometimes it is quite desirable to run jobs in background of a computer which can take considerable amount of time to finish, and this allows us to do work on other tasks, while keeping the jobs running. The way of running jobs, written in a mathematica notebook, in background is quite different from the conventional methods i.e., the techniques for the programs written in other languages like C, C++, F77, F90, F95, etc. To illustrate it, in the present article we study how to create a mathematica batch-file from a mathematica notebook and run it in the background. Finally, we explore the most significant issue of this article. Here we describe the basic ideas for parallelizing a mathematica program by sharing its independent parts into all other remote computers available in the network. Doing the parallelization, we can perform large computational operations within a very short period of time, and therefore, the efficiency of the numerical works can be achieved. Parallel computation supports any version of mathematica and it also works significantly well even if different versions of mathematica are installed in different computers. All the operations studied in this article run under any supported operating system like Unix, Windows, Macintosh, etc. For the sake of our illustrations, here we concentrate all the discussions only for the Unix based operating system.