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A chemical that has to be recovered is *not* a catalyst. This is basic chemistry terminology that we're talking about here. A catalyst can be briefly consumed in a reaction if it is immediately recreated, but a side recovery process makes it a reactant, not a catalyst. Otherwise, hydrogen would be a catalyst in hydrogen fuel cells (it's consumed when you combine it with oxygen, but it is recovered in a separate process through electrolysis or thermolysis). So, unless you want to argue that hydrogen is a fuel cell catalyst...

has to be to minimize imports

If you spend 20B$ to produce a 30,000kg/yr lunar aluminum production plant, with maintenance costs of 1B$/yr, you will never, ever repay it even ignoring the costs of getting your materials off the moon. That aluminum would only cost you 600m$ to ship from Earth. The capital costs savings of 20B$ invested would pay for the cost of shipping the raw materials with their interest alone, let alone with their value (and the fact that your interest would be compounding while you wait for the plant to come online), just ignoring the fact that your maintenance costs far outpace the value of your production even when it coms online.

Don't think these numbers are realistic? 30k kg of aluminum is 80kg/day. Aluminum refining consumes 15.4kWh/kg presently on Earth; a lunar refinery is going to be anything but efficient (since it needs to be light and operate in an unfriendly environment, and will be quite small scale), but lets be nice and say that it's only reduced to 20kWh/kg. That means 1600kWh/day = 66kW power needed. That's about the power that all of Mir produced on average. Factor in power for mining equipment, the operation of the casting house, the construction equipment, and the life support of the added workers, and I'd expect it to be somewhere around 100kW to run the smelting operation. That's put the total lunar base energy consumption still within the range of the next-gen space based nuclear reactors that NASA wants to build (100-300kW usually - for example, JIMO). So, that's a realistic production output level to produce the bulk parts.

Think the price is wrong? An aluminum mining, smelting, and casting operation on the moon is at *least* as complicated as ISS, which is estimated to cost 100B$ by the time all is said and done. It would be at least a competitor in terms of complexity to the rest of the lunar base project, which is also an estimated 100B$ project. Even if you assume that it's half the complexity of those, you still get far more than my overly kind 20B$ figure.

Notice how I mentioned earlier that I was ignoring the fact that the 20B$ (ha!) could be invested in the meantime while we wait for the plant to come online. What sort of ROI are we expecting? Well, the money wouldn't be an upfront lump sum; instead, there would be some of it spent each year during design and construction over perhaps a 20 year run. So, lets say 1B$/yr at 5% interest (low for a long term market investment). Continuously compounded, it's almost 35B$ before the base starts - a 75% increase in value. The annual interest is now worth 1.75B$, compared to your $600m of product (-400m$ when you count lunar maintenance costs)

Do you see why I am insistant that such a notion is completely uneconomical, just ignoring the cost of transporting the produced parts off the moon?

Space elevator

Ok, now we're into dreamland. L1 is 56k km from the moon; L2 is 67k km from the moon. This compares to the already monstrous 36k km to reach GEO. Then you have to go past that to counterbalance; with a tonne counterbalance, ~80k and ~120k km respectively. You only gain low tensile strength (and thus mass) requirements. If you go by Edwards' Earth-cable numbers (which assume a cheap cable already, shorter in length, low mainten

So ... ENIAC was the first computer using a mouse?

----

(See ENIAC VR Simulator ... also using a mouse)

I used to work at the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source at Argonne National Lab (IPNS) for a couple of years. While I was there ('96-98) one of the studies a post-doc did on the QENS instrument (iirc) was to study how anesthetics work. As it turns out, anesthetics enter between the walls of cells such that they recede so far from each other that the nerve senders/receptors can't make contact thus, the pain signals aren't transmitted to the brain.

Here's a little mind experiment: imagine having 2 balloons, one inside the other. Now, blow air into the outer balloon, leaving the inner balloon the same size. The air you push into the volume between the 2 balloons is the anesthetic. The more anesthetic, the farther apart the balloon walls get from each other and the nerves lose contact with each other.

So, it would follow that if you were to generally increase the amount of fluid in your body, the same thing would happen: the water would enter between the inner and outer cell walls such that the nerves would make less contact than normal.

Good ole Di-Hydrogen Monoxide!

Yup, so I guess it should be said the basis of all life (we know of) on earth is from four amino acids.

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/bio99/bio994 36.htm

this mission is perfect for our expertise! we've gotten quite good at sending huge chunks of metal hurtling twoard the surface of mars...

(with our luck, we'll miss completely and end up blowing up titan or europa and killing whatever life may reside there)

You are right that the prime mission will be pretty short. But the satellite will be taking some measurments along the way. Every year the instruments will be turned on to make sure everything still work when we get to Pluto. It takes lot of energy to get going fast enough to get to pluto in "only" nine years. To go into orbit, it would take a lot of energy to slow back down. If you had enough fuel to slow back down, it is still pretty complicated to put an object into orbit. Take a look at the expensive hardware lob page for an idea on how good we are at that. http://www.bio.aps.anl.gov/~dgore/fun/PSL/

To summarise Cold War reactors were designed to produce Plutonium (for weapons) with electricity as a byproduct, whereas IFR is designed to produce electricity. It produces half the waste and no plutonium or weapons grade material.

The main differences is Cold War reactors make the isotope into a ceramic and attempt to cool it with water where IFR uses the isotope as metal cooled with liquid metal. As ceramic is generally an insulator and water the coolant the fundamental design limitations become obvious (as the metal coolant can absorb much more energy where the water becomes steam).

However the really good thing about IFR technology is that it can use plutonium as fuel. This is the very waste product of Cold War reactors that cause the greatest concern as it has a half life of roughly 25,000 years. I believe this would be a win-win situation for many countries with large stockpiles of nuclear waste (you know those really big tanks with blue glow in them) as the current waste would become fuel and new waste products would have dramatically shorter half lives (in the hundreds of years).

Unfortunatley politicians are not very good at picking winners when it comes to these things and I think it was the current U.S administration that cut the funding to this promising facility. From what I learned about IFR, the best way to build a facility is complete complete with Fuel Reprocessing Facility. Lets just hope the French have it available as an option.

Hey, it might be all fantasy, but so far it the closest thing we have to a pragmatic and workable future for Nuclear energy that addresses the question of spent isotope waste products in a practical way (producing electricity) as opposed to letting future generations deal with it.

Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with the IFR project and while IANANP, my brother is.

Some links
http://www.anlw.anl.gov/anlw_history/reactors/ifr. html
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/phy99/phy99x x7.htm

To summarise Cold War reactors were designed to produce Plutonium (for weapons) with electricity as a byproduct, whereas IFR is designed to produce electricity. It produces half the waste and no plutonium or weapons grade material.

The main differences is Cold War reactors make the isotope into a ceramic and attempt to cool it with water where IFR uses the isotope as metal cooled with liquid metal. As ceramic is generally an insulator and water the coolant the fundamental design limitations become obvious (as the metal coolant can absorb much more energy where the water becomes steam).

However the really good thing about IFR technology is that it can use plutonium as fuel. This is the very waste product of Cold War reactors that cause the greatest concern as it has a half life of roughly 25,000 years. I believe this would be a win-win situation for many countries with large stockpiles of nuclear waste (you know those really big tanks with blue glow in them) as the current waste would become fuel and new waste products would have dramatically shorter half lives (in the hundreds of years).

Unfortunatley politicians are not very good at picking winners when it comes to these things and I think it was the current U.S administration that cut the funding to this promising facility. From what I learned about IFR, the best way to build a facility is complete complete with Fuel Reprocessing Facility. Lets just hope the French have it available as an option.

Hey, it might be all fantasy, but so far it the closest thing we have to a pragmatic and workable future for Nuclear energy that addresses the question of spent isotope waste products in a practical way (producing electricity) as opposed to letting future generations deal with it.

Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with the IFR project and while IANANP, my brother is.

Some links
http://www.anlw.anl.gov/anlw_history/reactors/ifr. html
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/phy99/phy99x x7.htm

To summarise Cold War reactors were designed to produce Plutonium (for weapons) with electricity as a byproduct, whereas IFR is designed to produce electricity. It produces half the waste and no plutonium or weapons grade material.

The main differences is Cold War reactors make the isotope into a ceramic and attempt to cool it with water where IFR uses the isotope as metal cooled with liquid metal. As ceramic is generally an insulator and water the coolant the fundamental design limitations become obvious (as the metal coolant can absorb much more energy where the water becomes steam).

However the really good thing about IFR technology is that it can use plutonium as fuel. This is the very waste product of Cold War reactors that cause the greatest concern as it has a half life of roughly 25,000 years. I believe this would be a win-win situation for many countries with large stockpiles of nuclear waste (you know those really big tanks with blue glow in them) as the current waste would become fuel and new waste products would have dramatically shorter half lives (in the hundreds of years).

Unfortunatley politicians are not very good at picking winners when it comes to these things and I think it was the current U.S administration that cut the funding to this promising facility. From what I learned about IFR, the best way to build a facility is complete complete with Fuel Reprocessing Facility. Lets just hope the French have it available as an option.

Hey, it might be all fantasy, but so far it the closest thing we have to a pragmatic and workable future for Nuclear energy that addresses the question of spent isotope waste products in a practical way (producing electricity) as opposed to letting future generations deal with it.

Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with the IFR project and while IANANP, my brother is.

Some links
http://www.anlw.anl.gov/anlw_history/reactors/ifr. html
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/phy99/phy99x x7.htm

Everyone knows that nuclear power is clean. Europeans are concerned about two other things:

1. Disaster. Nuclear engineers say that the chance of a meltdown is very small, but this argument is worthless after Harrisburg and Chernobyl. People in general are mathematically clueless, but they do know that the risk is real and not small after these two events.

2. Waste storage. Where do we put the waste products after burning it? People are afraid it might pollute the environment, perhaps not now but for furure generations. It will have to be stored for thousands of years. Shooting it out in space is not an option to most, having pictures of an explosing Columbia in the mind.

1. The reactors that caused these meltdown disasters were old, at least 50 years old technology. There are many modern nuclear reactor designs that do not melt down and can be employed. One example is GA's GT-MHR and another is the Pebble Bed type reactor

2. Nuclear waste does not need to be waste at all. There are new and exciting ways of recycling fuel, visit Argonne's website a link from an '03 press release. The fuel can be reprocessed and the left overs from the left overs have life spans of hundereds not hundereds of thousands of years. There are also new developments in transmutation technology. And more to come.

I think it's important to remember that many of the problems that exist today have the potential to be solved (and maybe have already been solved). To have a mindset that criticizes technology that is 50 years old as if it's the end-all-be-all to that technology is ignorant at best. It seems to me the biggest problem with public perception of nuclear is that it is based on old or even false ideas. It has become a propaganda war instead of an educational issue.

Quantum spin is not the same as with a top (or whatever). It's an analog of spin (and can, for example, be 1/2): Quantum Spin

Looks like another entry on the Mars Scorecard.

Mars is winning, folks.

http://www.bio.aps.anl.gov/~dgore/fun/PSL/marsscor ecard.html

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/chem99/chem9 9562.htm

That's from 5 sec of searching, but it is true. HCN binds to the heme quite strongly.

You of course are right in that cyanide kills by interfering in the electron transfer process as HCN binds to cytochrome a3 in mitochondria. HCN does bind to the heme in hemoglobin, too, just not as well as CO.

See the SEAL Reflex project, the OpenC++ project, the PUMA project(now in AspectC++), Arne Adams' reflection library, and XVF by Kurt Stephens. These all work and provide introspection to some degree. There are other projects like Stroustrup and dos Reis's The Pivot and Vandevoorde's Metacode that may make it into future C++ standards to make it easier to provide good introspection support.

SEAL Reflex http://seal-reflex.web.cern.ch/seal-reflex/

OpenC++ http://opencxx.sourceforge.net/

AspectC++ http://www.aspectc.org/

Reflection library http://www.arneadams.com/index.html

XVF http://kurtstephens.com/research/paper/xvf_paper/

The Pivot talks http://charm.cs.uiuc.edu/patHPC/slides/stroustrup- a.pdf
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/workshops/DSLOpt/Talks /DosReis.pdf

Metacode talk http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers /2003/n1471.pdf

In fact, you can view the current "scorecard" here: ;-)

http://www.bio.aps.anl.gov/~dgore/fun/PSL/marsscor ecard.html

"The average computer uses as much as 140 jack-o-lanterns worth of coal to run on any given day."

How much coal is a jack-o-lantern's worth? A coal-fired plant will use up about 3 liters of coal to power a 300W PC for 24 hours.

I base those numbers on the following assumptions: that the density of coal is about 1.3 g/cc, that coal has 8,800 btu/lb, and that the average coal-fired plant's efficiency is such that it produces 8,800 btu/lb926 watt-hours per pound of coal. The heat content of coal used for electric generation varies, but that's probably toward the low end of the range.

So, 300 w*24 hours is 7200 w-h. 7200/926=7.77 lbs. That's 3.5 kg, near enough. (3500 g) / (1.3 g/cc) = 2,692 cc or 2.692 liters. Now, if we assume that you referred to a "jack-o-lanterns worth" as by volume, we can do a bit of simple geometry and find that a perfectly spherical, 2,692 cc pumpkin would be 17" in diameter. That's a large, but not huge, pumpkin. ONE pumpkin. If your statement that it's 140 jack-o-lanterns worth by volume can be considered to be true, we must then find that you consider a jack-o-lantern to be 3.3 cm in diameter.

I think you're confusing a jack-o-lantern and a golfball. Those must be a bitch to carve.

"The average computer uses as much as 140 jack-o-lanterns worth of coal to run on any given day."

How much coal is a jack-o-lantern's worth? A coal-fired plant will use up about 3 liters of coal to power a 300W PC for 24 hours.

I base those numbers on the following assumptions: that the density of coal is about 1.3 g/cc, that coal has 8,800 btu/lb, and that the average coal-fired plant's efficiency is such that it produces 8,800 btu/lb926 watt-hours per pound of coal. The heat content of coal used for electric generation varies, but that's probably toward the low end of the range.

So, 300 w*24 hours is 7200 w-h. 7200/926=7.77 lbs. That's 3.5 kg, near enough. (3500 g) / (1.3 g/cc) = 2,692 cc or 2.692 liters. Now, if we assume that you referred to a "jack-o-lanterns worth" as by volume, we can do a bit of simple geometry and find that a perfectly spherical, 2,692 cc pumpkin would be 17" in diameter. That's a large, but not huge, pumpkin. ONE pumpkin. If your statement that it's 140 jack-o-lanterns worth by volume can be considered to be true, we must then find that you consider a jack-o-lantern to be 3.3 cm in diameter.

I think you're confusing a jack-o-lantern and a golfball. Those must be a bitch to carve.

follow up:
one cause is AIS which basically makes it so your cells dont accept androgens and an XY male with this has somewhat deformed (mostly internally), but female reproductive organs. This is related in that not receiving the hormones has the same effect as not being able to 'process/use' them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen_insensitivit y_syndrome

check these links as well:
http://www.hopkinschildrens.org/specialties/catego rypages/intersex/sd2.html
http://www.hopkinschildrens.org/specialties/catego rypages/intersex/sd3.html
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/mole00/mole0 0074.htm

SuSE 10 (the one we are discussing here today) has a Live DVD also.
I know, I'm using it right now and I love it.

Download the iso here, burn it to DVD, leave it in the DVD drive, and reboot.

Enjoy.

No, but plants have been shut down on account of environmentalist pressures. They do not build them in the middle of cities; they build them on a cooling water source (river / lake / etc) about 20 miles from a major city and run transmission lines nearby.

In southeastern pennsylvania, there's an odd dynamic going on... for the 20 years that my family lived near Limerick nuclear station, noone wanted to build near the plant, on account of all the (unfounded) environmentalist panic. Then the area went through a housing boom in the early '00s, and suddenly all this land became very desireable, since its all 5 minutes from the major highway in the area (route 422) which makes it the perfect commuting spot. Next thing you know, $350k houses are popping up left and right, right in the valley of the shadow of de.. I mean, the cooling towers.

Here's a map of every utility owned nuclear plant that has been built in the united states & canada, including the decomissioned ones.

Enjoy.

Overall, we're really only about 33% successful at it. Space Travel is Not Easy.

Ultimately the case was thrown out because they brought the radar gun into the court room and clocked a wall travelling at 4mph.

Wow, was that at the north-pole? Because in the US that wall would have probably been travelling a couple orders of magnitude faster.

Late to the party, but I'd like to add this.
This only holds if you ignore the fact that the majority of audible sound does not come directly from the source, but from "re-radiated" sound waves emanating from the (metal) exterior of the case.
How is this significant?
Conduction of sound waves through metal is 10-20 times faster than through air(http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/phy00/ph y00058.htm), so positional phase variation can be ignored (it's scaled by the same factor). This vastly simplifies the whole process in both hardware and software.
Considerations:
- Only one microphone is needed, although there would have to be multiple "speakers" attached to the case with outputs differing in frequency and magnitude content. Fairly easily accomplished in software
- feedback control. A "long range" fft/wavelet based solution would circumvent this, although "random" noise (as opposed to the predictable whine of motors in fans and hdd's) would still remain at low levels.
- damping issues, although we're mainly interested in the higher frequencies lying well above the resonance point of the case and panels

Life would still have the potential to exist elsewhere, but would have to adapt to a different environment.

This is a fairly common theory (especially in the wake of the early findings that the other planets in the Solar System are uninhabitable by humans), but our studies of our own solar system suggest it to be untrue. If life were as adaptable as suggested, then we'd find inflatable beings on Jupiter, Crystaline entities on Venus, creepy crawlers on Mars, and other life forms well suited to their environment.

Yet no such creatures have ever been found. Hope is still held that water creatures may be found on Jupiter's Icy Moons (specifically Europa), but we've pretty much exhausted the remainder of the Solar System.

Turning back inward toward Earth, we can't find life in many combinations. Pretty much all life on Earth follows the pattern of Carbon-basis with DNA information storage. About the most extreme variations are the circulatory systems of animals, with some having Copper-based blood.

Some organisms are able to survive extreme conditions, but they tend to not actually thrive in such environments. There are no signs of life that has specifically adapted to survive in conditions equating that of the more extreme planets. Even the Silicon-based Lifeform theory suffers heavily from a lack of any known examples.

While we occupy only an insignificant portion of the universe, our best evidence to date suggests that we may be far more alone than we might have hoped.

P.S. The Wikipedia article on The Fermi Paradox goes over many of these points in detail.

Sooo... flying from NY to say London and going over that "nice warm" North Atlantic Ocean is soooo much safer..

look at the odd's , crunch the numbers.

the USA has about 40K ppl die per year from car crashes, and about 25 - 30 K from assaultings ( shootings , stabbings etc )

http://www.the-eggman.com/writings/death_stats.htm l

** snip **
In the US, each year there are about 40,000 deaths per year in automobile
accidents vs. about 200 in air transport. To put this in perspective, the
chance of dying in an automobile accident is about 1000 times more than
winning a typical state lottery in a year.

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/gen99/gen998 45.htm

Sooo yeah .. you have a greater chance of dying by "driving your car" to the airport, than you have of dying by the plane falling out of the air.

but even with that said, if you did go down in the North Atlantic, at least you wouldnt have to worry about the pain for more than about 3 or 4 mins.

I have been following the progress of research concerning space-elevator for some time now. The LiftPort Group of companies working towards a space-elevator are making a great deal of progress. See here and here for more LiftPort specific information. Slashdot reported on the faa approval of their high altitude tests several days ago -- refer to that thread for some interesting discussion. Check here and here here for several reports concerning the viability of the elevator -- be sure to check the NIAC pdf. Also, Blaise Gassend has a great collection of information. Finally, though carbon nanotubes are still in their infancy (its been a little over 12 years since they were discovered) - their theoretical tensile strengths are perfect for use in the construction of a space elevator tether. This recent development spells a rosy future, and many innovations yet to come.

Yeah, I don't quite know why the question is being asked of /. but anywho, glad it is...

I don't particularly trust anything at all I read on "physorg" unless it is also published somewhere else and this search is not boosting my confidence in the article's validity. Other things which make me doubt the clam VERY VERY MUCH are the fact that lightning has a temperature usually not reported in the literature to be above 40-50,000 Kelvin while virtually all fusion devices (which are in thermal equilibrium, as this would also be the mechanism here presumably unless they are proposing some super exotically weird non-equilibrium mechanism) need to attain temperatures in the MILLIONS of K range to even begin seeing neutrons. The fact that they are also claiming that this explains why they see "100 times the background" levels of neutrons during lightning storms is, I think, bordering on the ridiculous. There is a reason it took us until just 2 years ago to discover that lightning emits x-rays, and that is because uhmmm it involves studying lightning at very close range! Interference effects in sensitive electronic equipment caused by the insanely huge magnetic and electric field pulse very close by are extremely hard to eliminate. Until I read the paper, I'll very highly doubt this neutron/fusion "discovery".

Anyway, I think the following line in the submission needs some factual clarification:
"Perhaps more controversially, and yet to be discussed on Slashdot, the NIF has possible plans for a hybrid fusion approach that uses not only deuterium and tritium, but uranium and plutonium as well in what amounts to a miniaturized version of how thermonuclear weapons achieve fusion. Fears are that this could lead directly to micro-H-bombs."

This is a bit of a convoluted misconception. Firstly when NIF (if they ever finish the damn thing) compresses and ignites its DT capsules, they will theoretically produce a gain of something like a maximum of ~50. That is to say, they will release ~50 times more energy than was delivered to them by the lasers which are used to start the reaction and this will result in the emission of a neutron pulse and other thermal and electromagnetic energy in the 10s of megajoules range. This is exactly a replica of a thermonuclear bomb in the lab (without the primary). They ARE "micro-H-bombs", that's the whole idea of the thing. Secondly NIF want's to use uranium and plutonium as reported recently not because they will increase the fusion yield of the micro-bombs but rather because the megabar, megakelvin conditions achievable with NIF will allow the examination of these metals at the conditions which are found at the cores of imploding primaries (and secondary "sparkplugs"). These are called "subcriticals" and they allow the examination of the equation of state" of these metals at energy regimes pertinent to A-bombs without having an actual chain reaction occur.

As for the question "With all the recent discoveries and developments in fusion research, my question for Slashdotters - are we on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be'"...
Don't count on it. There are lots of very promising and very very exciting ideas out there, but fusion on an economic (and laboratory; ie. not H-bombs) scale is just damn hard to do. The 30 year rule, sadly, still applies. T

The LiftPort Group of companies working towards a space-elevator are making a great deal of progress. Slashdot reported on the faa approval of their high altitude tests, for example. See here and here for more LiftPort specific information. Check here and here here for several reports concerning the viability of the elevator -- be sure to check the NIAC pdf. Blaise Gassend has a great collection of information. Finally, though carbon nanotubes are still in their infancy (its been a little around ten years since they were discovered) - their theoretical tensile strengths are perfect for application in a space elevator construction. This recent development spells a rosy future, and many innovations yet to come.

I could have been more explicit in why there is a distinction between the kind of carbon nanotubes fabricated by the University of Texas process (a much improved production process of nanotubes essentially the same as those produced for over 10 years) and the structurally different nanotubes recently developed by Argonne National Laboratory from Ultrananocrystalline(TM) diamond (a new form of carbon developed at Argonne). See, for instance, http://www.anl.gov/Media_Center/News/2005/news0508 30.html. The new form of nanotube is far more resistant to wear and lower in friction than the traditional carbon nanotube (thus seemingly appropriate for the needs of a space elevator) but very new and large scale production has not yet occurred.

(Also, MPICH sucks when used with multiple devices - you have to compile it with the device(s) you're using, and can only configure it for one device type at a time. So if you're planning on using a mix of Infiniband, Globus and Ethernet, forget it. It won't work.)

Probably the best MPI library out there is Open MPI, which supports the MPI2 standard, supports MPI threads and progress threads, is much more optimizable for different platforms and was developed by groups ranging from Los Alamos Laboratories (yes, the nuke place) and the LAM/MPI development team.

Ok, you have a choice between two implementations. One is slow, has a poor release cycle and has been forked numerous times (MPICH, MPICH2, MP-MPICH, Globus MPICH, GAMMA MPICH and MVICH are all forks off the same code-base). The other is partially written in assembler, is developed by a broad consortium of MPI experts and is unlikely to fork as the maintainers are really good about integrating new code. Which would you pick?

I am also concerned about Microsoft's history of "Embrace and Extend' - are they planning on breaking the MPI-2 specifications for their own purposes? I can't see any value in them doing so, but I don't see any value in 'Embrace and Extend' anyway.

In my shameless search for a site to cite, I found this http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/dbpp/ which covers lots of problems that have to be solved.

I'd love to see a language (or language extension) cleanly define a way to let me define a code block attributes which could affect how and where it gets executed. The runtime library could then distribute that block as the environment best allows.

You can track the performance of the various countries on the official PSL Scoreboard.

As the other poster noted, I wrote the original entry from memory, so some of my figures are a bit off. It's interesting to see however, just how close I am.

As for the waste of the recycled waste, what you're really doing is just re-seperating the fuel. What you end up with is functionally identical to new fuel.

ANL-W History - Reactors
Points: New fuel achieves 10-20% fission rate before replacement. Current rate: 3-6%. Reprocessing spent fuel with these reactors: Reduce waste stream by a factor of 2 to 10. 80% reuse would result in a factor of 5, which is midstream.

All they wanted to do was trying to see if they can still score a point in the expensive hardware lobbing contest, while actually crashing a spacecraft.

TDP cheats, the energy used to remove the water is actually the same energy used to break down the organic molecules. TDP requires water. The water is heated for pressure to break down the organics, it is then quickly depressurised causing it to boil off rapidly. Instant dry! :-)

It is laughable to say that the body has pulled out most of the caloric value, the body cant process any fiber, and is no where near 100% efficient in using the energy inside sugars, fats, and protiens. Also the sewage wouldn't produce "net" oil. But it does.

Also on the trash front, yes it is possible to put a bound on the ammount of oil produceable by TDP. It is directly proportional to the world's output of garbage, sewage, and other waste products. I'll give a rough estimate below.

And yes TDP will if nothing else be a better way to take care of waste reclamation problems. however I think you grossly misunderestimate the amount of waste the world produces.

a quick google produces

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/newton/askasci/1993/ environ/ENV005.HTM/

"Your first question on the average number of pounds of trash produced by Illinois residents has a rather shocking answer. My sources say that we produce about five pounds of trash per person per day. While this may not seem too extreme, consider that the people of India produce only 1/2 pound of trash per person per day, 10 times less"

and here

http://www.metro-region.org/article.cfm?articleid= 5579/
"Each individual generates about 1.5 tons of solid waste per year - about 4.5 pounds per person, per day. If we continue this pattern, we will have each created 90,000 pounds of trash in our lifetimes.
Environmental Protection Agency, "Resource Conservation Challenge: Reducing Waste and Recovering Energy," EPA 530-F-02-033, 2002"

So lets assume the world average is 1 lb per person per day. assuming America is the highest and india is on the lowend. (and we will not consider the industrial waste products which are actually many many times more massive than the indvidual waste so this is a VERY lowball estimate)

6 billion people * 1 lb * 365 day / year = 2,190,000,000,000 ~ 2.1 billion lbs of waste per year (i dont believe this even includes sewage)

Assuming we used TDP to convert it all to oil at the sewage rate of 26% we get 569,400,000,000 ~ 500 billion lbs of oil per year.

http://www.simetric.co.uk/si_materials.htm/

Oil, petroleum (881 kg) / (cubic meters)

google calculator...

(881 kg) / (cubic meters) = 7.35230135 pound / US gallon

500 billion / (7.35230135 pound / US gallon) = 68 Billion gallons per year ... / 42 gallons per barrel = ~ 1.6 billion barrels of oil per year

1.6 billion / 365 = ~ 4,383,561 barrels of oil per day ...

The world pumps ~ 30 - 40 million barrels of oil per day. (OPEC is at 25ish so I estimated)

TDP can provide 10% of the World oil production. And as we get onto the other side of the Hubbert peak, that percentage will grow higher and higher.

-----------------

Does this solve the complete energy problem? No.

Is it a big step? Yes.

Will purposefully created fuels(biodiesel) be part of the equation also? Yes, but rememebr with TDP we can reclaim some of the waste at each cycle.

Will TDP provide better, more sustainable ways to clean sewage & provide drinking water, dispose of trash, and keep more energy in the loop? YES

Man that took way too long....

All of these future claims are just investment ballons floated to fleece the easily duped. There are plenty of technological problems associated with mining Mars including lifting the mined material off the surface. Bob Park wrote in his book "Voodoo Science" that it would cost more than $800USD to put ~$300USD of gold into orbit. His conclusion was that if gold were available in low-Earth orbit, it wouldn't pay to go get it. That is the first thing they teach in an economic geology course.

The materials on Mars are no different than here on Earth, only the abundances are different. So you mine a bunch of aluminosilicates and then what? Do these people realize how much energy it takes to break those bonds? Where is their proposed power source? The amount of solar energy reaching Mars is less than here on Earth. I hope they weren't counting on that source. Nuclear energy might be useful, but I don't know of anyone who has done a uranium assay of Martian ores. Are we going to ship power to Mars? How is that cost effective?

Unless these people have gone through a complete analysis of what it costs to go to Mars then I can't see how any of them can make any claim of profitability, let alone put a target date on their venture.

I think his post is a little off the mark, but jd (1658) has the right idea -- if you are concerned about portable representation of your data, you might want to use a higher-level library. HDF5 and NetCDF are good choices.

Even beter might be Parallel-NetCDF. It has all the benefits of a high-level library (portable, self-describing data representation), but it has a much simpler interface than HDF5. Unlike serial NetCDF, you'll probably see much better performance as all processes can carry out I/O collectively instead of forwarding to a master .

Now, we move onto the portable I/O. The vast majority of scientific software (which is, in turn, the bulk of MPI-based software) uses the Heirarchical Data Format. There are two versions worthy of mention - HDF5 and Parallel HDF. Both support MPI in operations. Compile HDF5 with MPI support, and you have something that will support platform-independent atomic and compound data types.

Of all the options, HDF5 (from the NCSA) is the most widely used. I would say that the majority of scientific and distributed software out there that uses platform-independent typing uses HDF. So does the grid computing system Globus. The other platform-independent complex data typing libraries, CDF (from NASA) and NetCDF (from UniData), are rarely used. Indeed, the next generation of NetCDF - version 4 - will be built on top of HDF5. There's a link to the development site and the source code on Freshmeat.

Less-widely used, but still very significant, is the Transparent Parallel I/O Environment. I am not 100% sure if this supports MPI, it's been a while since I've used it and I never put in the dependencies on Freshmeat for it.

Depending on what is being done, PETSc may also be worth checking out. This supports MPI-based differential equations.

Globus can use MPI for communication and then handle the I/O directly. This means you only have to write your interface for one API, not one API per type of operation. Main problem is that Globus has a fairly large footprint, so you might not want to do that unless the project is large enough to warrant that kind of sophistication.

what dangers are there with fusion? doesnt the thermoreaction evaporate to nothing if something malfunctions? http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/phy99/phy992 98.htm

If it's a one way trip, it shouldn't be too hard to send the additional shielding material to Mars on a seperate craft before hand. It's not like someone's going to steal it if it sits there for a few months before being assembled.

Thanks, I was hoping that someone would point out that unmanned missions can forward-position critical materials and supplies long before humans set foot in the joint.

But your casual comment, "It's not like someone's going to steal it," has me rethinking the plan, especially in light of the ongoing problem of Martian vandalism! Imagine the distress when you land at your equipment drop site, and find that the rovers have all had their tires slashed.

There has been a few studies recently that show that even if ethanol was the best solution and had, say the same efficiency as petrol for running your car, producing the quantities we need would mean that more than 100% of all arable land has to be used.

Not wanting to spend my life eating artificial meat and artificial vegetables because you use all the good land to grow fuel, if would take it well if you started right now looking for another solution...

Look, on one hand you have this :
"The results clearly identify that ethanol outperformed conventional and reformulated gasoline with respect to energy use and reducing greenhouse gas emissions"
http://transtech.anl.gov/v3n3/greet.html

And on the other those data :
http://earthtrack.net/earthtrack/index.asp?page_id =190&catid=66
http://www.cleanairchoice.org/outdoor/PDF/Ethanol_ SeparatingFactFromFiction.pdf

Now make your own mind...

P.S. You are actually proposing we use high-proof booze for fuel ? Yeah, right...

I'm not talking about that force vector. I'm talking about the equal and oppositely force vector required by Newton's 3rd law. It points outward from the center and is therefore centrifugal.

Maybe you should Ask a Scientist. The equal-and-opposite force when gravity is involved is the reciprocal gravitational attraction.

SuSE 9.3 Professional LiveDVD

Download it (that's a fast site, thanks Uncle Sam!)
Burn it to DVD.
Boot from DVD.
Experiment with SuSE 9.3 Pro

When you are done, reboot, pull out the DVD and your file system is un-modified.

PVM offers both the spec and the implementation, MPI offers a newer spec with several solid implementations. But no, NIH-syndrom prevails and another piece of half-baked software is born.

Where I work, the monstrosity uses Java RMI to pass the input data and computation results around -- encapsulated in XML, no less...

It is very hard to fight -- I did a comparision implementing the same task in PVM and in our own software. Depending on the weight of the individual computation being distributed, PVM was from 10 to 300% faster and used 5 times less bandwidth. Upper management saw the white paper...

Guess, what we continue to develop and push to our clients?

• High Performance Linpack (Requires MPI and either BLAS or VSIPL)
  
• High Performance Computing Challenge - the ultimate in stress-testing software
  

Dependencies:

• LAMPI - MPI from the Government's laboratories at Los Alamos
  
• MPICH - another version of MPI
  
• ATLAS - a portable version of BLAS
  
• VSIPL - a heavy number-crunching image processing package
  

I doubt many Slashdotter machines will do well against the top 500, but it might be fun to do our own "top 500" (for sheer geek value and bragging rights).

See Ask A Scientist.

Read this

while you are correct about the "tons" theory, your numbers are a bit off. Or, you just frequent much bigger/hotter homes and cars than I do. But a typical car unit is about 1 ton, and most homes have units ranging from 1.5 - 5 tons. I have put 5 ton units on many retail buildings.

There is a lot of debate about this though, as many consumers believe the more tons the better. That is not always the case, if you are truly interested you could take a look at this:

http://hem.dis.anl.gov/eehem/95/950509.html

...without the Expensive Hardware Lobbing scorecard. Play along at home.

...storage?

If you can flip the spin of an electron, wouldn't that be a condensing of our current storage technology?

However, after doing a Google for the size of an electron as compared to an atom, this road bump chucked my question out the window.

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/phy00/phy006 66.htm