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Overview

Mathematica is a general purpose mathematical analysis package from Wolfram Research. It is a fully integrated technical computing system which combines powerful computing software with a convenient user interface. Mathematica's notebook format allows for the generation of cross-platform, fully customizable files that provide professional mathematically typesetting and publication-quality layout of electronic and printed media. Mathematica's features include symbolic and numeric computation, 2D and 3D data visualization, broad programming capabilities, and one-step creation of web documents. The Mathematica package can be used as a direct calculation tool or as a powerful modeling and simulation tool.

Usage

First you need to decide on the version of the software you want to use. Use

$ module avail mathematica

to check what versions are available. We normally recommend using the latest version available. For example, to load the version 12.1.0 of mathematica use

$ module load mathematica/12.1.0

For more details on using modules see our modules help page.

Run math for the command line version or mathematica for the graphical version.

Please remember to add the PBS flag -l software=mathematica to your job submission script.

A typical batch job script looks like:

#!/bin/bash

#PBS -l walltime=48:00:00
#PBS -l mem=1gb
#PBS -l software=mathematica
#PBS -l wd

# Load module, always specify version number. 
module load mathematica/12.1.0

# Must include `#PBS -l storage=scratch/ab12+gdata/yz98` if the job
# needs access to `/scratch/ab12/` and `/g/data/yz98/`. Details on:
# https://opus.nci.org.au/display/Help/PBS+Directives+Explained

# Run mathematica application
math -script input.m > output 2>&1

The file input.m can be generated by the mathematica gui on your local machine and transferred over. Submit the job to the queuing system using the command:

$ qsub math.pbs

See the userguide for more details on the batch system.

The command mathematica appears to work in v12, but you my find it easier to use it on your local machine and then transfer the input file for calculations.

Mathematica is now threaded and it may be possible to get some speed up from using multiple processors. We recommend caution with this and you should try timing the same number of jobs on differing numbers of processors to see whether there is any gain in running in parallel.

License requirements

Access to the Mathematica license is for academic research only and is restricted to Australian National University (ANU) staff and students only. Please request to join software group on https://my.nci.org.au if you wish to request access.