Mathematica is made of two parts: a kernel and a front end. The
kernel is the part that does calculations. The front end, or
interface, is the part that handles interaction with the user.
There are two kinds of front ends: text based
and notebook based. The text based interface interacts with the
Mathematica system when you type input at the keyboard and
receive text output on your screen. On computers that support a more
sophisticated graphical user interface, Mathematica will
support a notebook interface. Notebooks are interactive documents
that display the output according to your computer's capabilities.
The front end is a separate program that accepts input from a variety
of sources, sends the data to the kernel, and receives the output
based upon certain criteria, such as the graphic capabilities of the
machine running the front end.
The front end and kernel programs are called Mathematica and
MathKernel, respectively. On single user installations of
Mathematica, both the kernel and the front end reside on the
same machine, e.g. the Macintosh systems in Bell Hall 130.
The Math Department Sun network has an unlimited multiuser
license. Here, the Mathematica kernel resides on the Sun
workstation galileo in Bell Hall 215. Sessions by Mathematica
users are run in galileo and output is piped to the user's
workstation or terminal automatically by starting
Mathematica.
Each major session requires about 6 MB of memory on galileo. At
the present time, this means we would be able to support four major
concurrent sessions. Memory is the major limitation. Exact arithmetic
uses up available memory very quickly. When memory is exhausted,
Mathematica will have to be restarted and all
calculations/programs not stored will be lost.
The notebook feature of Mathematica is called up by typing mathematica from any workstation. In a later section, we discuss ways the user may reduce Mathematica's memory usage when using the notebook feature of Mathematica.
In the next section, Making a Subdirectory for Mathematica , we discuss our recommendations and assumptions in starting a Mathematica session in non-notebook mode on The Sun network.