Maplesoft today announced the addition of a new toolbox to the Maple Professional Toolbox Series. The Grid Computing Toolbox enables distributed computing using Maple, the primary tool for engineers, to solve complex mathematical problems and create rich technical documents. The Grid Computing Toolbox enables users to run Maple computations in parallel, taking advantage of all the hardware resources available, cutting down on processing time and enabling applications that were not possible before. “This new toolbox allows users to distribute computations across the nodes of a network of workstations, a supercomputer, or across the CPUs of a multiprocessor machine,” said Laurent Bernardin, Vice President of Research and Development, Maplesoft. “This allows for the handling of problems that are not tractable on a single machine because of memory limitations or because it would simply take too long.” The simplicity in setting up this toolbox is one of its key features. Users start a server process on each machine on a network and the grid will self-assemble as each node automatically detects the other nodes that are present. It also integrates into existing job scheduling systems. An earlier version of the Grid Computing Toolbox was available as HPC Grid and was sold as a third party MapleConnect product by Maplesoft.