Examples: WolframTones Powered by webMathematica

WolframTones, the innovative online music and ringtone generator based on Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, uses webMathematica to discover unique musical patterns in the computational universe. With webMathematica as its backbone, WolframTones dynamically generates up to a month's worth of continuous music every minute, serving each composition from back-end to user in just three-hundredths of a second.

The user-friendly interface features interactive buttons, pull-down menus, and sliders that are also handled by webMathematica. Input from these key GUI components is automatically translated into Mathematica so visitors can fully interact with the site without knowing any code.

Infrastructure

Once a user defines a new cellular-automaton-based musical composition in the WolframTones web interface, the data is transferred to a 64-bit cluster that includes a four-processor dual-core Sun Fire V40z server and a four-processor dual-core AMD machine. The Sun Fire runs Solaris 10--newly supported by Mathematica 5.2--and the AMD runs Linux. webMathematica runs on many platforms, but the powerful architecture of these two new industry-leading servers helps optimize performance while cutting down on operational costs.

Behind each frontline server is an automatically load-balanced webMathematica server. These servers pass the request to a pool of webMathematica kernels that convert the CA pattern to a musical score. The score is then sent back through the cluster as sound and played live in the browser window.

Each server and kernel is linked and maintained centrally by the kernel manager program. The manager distributes requests to available kernels and bypasses any hardware or software outages. It also adds security to the site by making requests untraceable and keeping the servers anonymous to end-users.

The high-availability system can therefore have individual servers or kernels taken down at any time without shutting down the entire site. webMathematica's inherent scalability allows new network machines and kernels to be added on demand. Such maintenance is transparent to users, who can continue to compose new music and download it to their cellular phones while the site is updated.

webMathematica's ability to monitor itself and automatically adjust to changes in the network also makes it particularly cost effective. Its built-in safeguards reduce administrative time, while ensuring that the site stays live during unusually high loads so traffic is never lost.

Performance

After being picked up by one of the internet's largest news forums, for example, WolframTones managed a record number of hits without any noticeable slowdowns. In addition to this and other sudden spikes, the site has received constant mass-media exposure and accepted the increasing demand without strain. Even at its highest loads, WolframTones has not suffered any noticeable decrease in performance.

Users spend an average of 15 minutes on the site. During this time, webMathematica generates continual dynamic content that includes customizations for musical style, rhythm, instruments, tempo, and more, and does so for very large loads of simultaneous users. WolframTones can even "remember" compositions, play them back, and generate them randomly--all in addition to the complex task of converting CAs to music.

Scalability is a hallmark of the system. As webMathematica easily adjusts for these massive loads, it takes on the most robust computational and network demands without any lag. This also lends great flexibility in developing the WolframTones site. New functionality can be easily added when necessary without ever sacrificing performance.

WolframTones underscores webMathematica's versatility as a complete web-development package. It incorporates webMathematica's main capabilities to put interactive computation online, but also supports an innovative interface of web-based tools. The site is powered by webMathematica, but is still an independent application that can be customized to suit any audience or task.