[Bioclusters] anyone using gridMathematica ?

[Chris Dagdigian]

I'm trying to get my head around the concept of using Wolfram's 
gridMathematica in a compute farm setting.

The Mathematica product allows one to launch "mathlink kernels" on 
remote unix or windows hosts. They are quite proud of how standalone and 
independent the product is (all it needs is a tcp connection). heh. I'm 
tring to bring the product into the fold so to speak with other 
cluster-aware applications that use the cluster resource management and 
batch scheduling subsystems.

Single host use within a compute farm is easy. It's trivial to bsub or 
qsub an interactive request for 'math' and run a single mathematica 
kernel on a fast remote machine. Now I want to run against N mathematica 
kernels speaking via mathlink to each other.

The eventual goal is tight integration within LSF and SGE but right now 
I'll be happy with a loose "get the hostnames from the batch scheduler 
and feed those into a mathematica notebook or shell script that will 
then launch the mathlink kernels" sort of way.

Has anyone done this?

Also- I'm a complete idiot when it comes to math. Are there any 
mathematica users out there who can share a test/demo computation that 
actually makes use of functions like ParallelMap and ParallelTable?

Regards,
Chris