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I won't research for you, but if you're interested, the preprints archive at LANL has a lot of relevant theory. Basically, the current research is trying to come with a unified framework for so-called "phase transitions" in stochastic discrete processes. One of the most studied problems is the transition between "easy" and "hard" problems in 3-SAT (three-satisfiability). Brian Hayes has a very readable article about this phenomenon, with references. The authority in this field seems to be Gabriel Istrate.

The emergence of the giant component in random networks is a mature field of research, of course pioneered by Erdös, and with players of the likes of Don Knuth and Doron Zeilberger.

From a mathematical standpoint, Graph Theory per se is not really complicated, what actually is is the asymptotic analysis of stochastic processes.

HTH,
Matas

I won't research for you, but if you're interested, the preprints archive at LANL has a lot of relevant theory. Basically, the current research is trying to come with a unified framework for so-called "phase transitions" in stochastic discrete processes. One of the most studied problems is the transition between "easy" and "hard" problems in 3-SAT (three-satisfiability). Brian Hayes has a very readable article about this phenomenon, with references. The authority in this field seems to be Gabriel Istrate.

The emergence of the giant component in random networks is a mature field of research, of course pioneered by Erdös, and with players of the likes of Don Knuth and Doron Zeilberger.

From a mathematical standpoint, Graph Theory per se is not really complicated, what actually is is the asymptotic analysis of stochastic processes.

HTH,
Matas

Actually, according to this page, helium is a byproduct of natural gas production. From memory, the helium is the result of alpha decay of uranium and other radioactive elements in the earth's crust. The helium is trapped by the same geologic structures that trap natural gas.

Does the LinuxBIOS project even show up on your company's radar? That is, is there any concern that x86 BIOS will be (further) commoditized, and hence decrease BIOS profit margins? Where would your company go next if the bottom fell out of the BIOS market?

As an example of the decreased relevance of the BIOS in modern computing, consider how Linux (the kernel) ignores the BIOS wherever possible and goes straight to the hardware, relegating the BIOS to the boot sequence and (usually buggy) power management.

-Paul Komarek

Given the existence of The LinuxBIOS Project and the fact that the Linux kernel does not require a ROM-BIOS once the kernel is up and running, what will be AMI's position on refunds if a significant fraction of the Linux userbase starts installing LinuxBIOS and returning the BIOS chips. Will AMI make the refund, or will they give us the runaround that Microsoft and the hardware OEMs did on the question of Windows refunds?

Since when do cigarettes give off radiation?

Tobacco contains large amounts of polonium-210 which is radioactive.

A smoker who smokes 1 pack a day gets the equivalent of something like 200-500 chest x-rays in a year.

Some links:

http://www.no-smoking.org/may00/05-19-00-1.html

http://www.ringnebula.com/peds_paper.htm

http://nepenthes.lycaeum.org/Drugs/THC/Health/canc er.rad.html

If you're interested in estimating your yearly radiation dose, check out:

http://newnet.lanl.gov/main.htm

Compare the dose from a plutonium powered pacemaker with that from smoking one pack of cigarettes a day -- cigarettes give you about 10 times as much radiation as the pacemaker.

Actually not quite, I do find this issue extremely fascinating and I had thought of submitting this story earlier today, but I felt that there wasn't any actual news here. The thing is, currently, there is no evidence whatsoever that supports VSL (Varying Speed of Light) theories in any appreciable way, as the NYT writes, Superstring theorist super-star (as far as physics goes :) Edward Witten calls the whole thing "unimpressive". VSL is basically a product of physicists brainstorming to somehow come up with an answer to that most pressing question: just how to consolidate quantum mechanics (Bohr, Heisenberg, et al., about the really really small stuff) with Einstein's general relativity (mainly about gravity, big'n'fast stuff).

It is actually not that much of a stretch. After all, when Einstein published his findings about ninety-eight years ago (I think), physicists abandoned the notion of absolute time (you have to spend a moment sometime to really appreciate what that means, most of the time, we really are Newtonians through and through). Today, some theoreticians and experimenters are considering to do the same with c, the speed of light.

The idea that c varies, however, is not all that new, it has already been conjectured to be a function of time, c -> c(t), to make sense of some odd stuff in cosmology. What's new in Dr. Magueijo and other's work is that they play with the idea of c varying in much more complex scenarios, having to do with with position, wavelength, momentum, etc.

It's worth mentioning that the latest shift in the literature tends to go to a varying alpha, the fine structure "constant", from which c can be seen to be derived from. For more info, check out this article, co-authored by Magueijo (full text in pdf, on windows you have to add ".pdf" to the filename).

Needlessly to say, there's dozens of scientific articles about this issue, some quite readable (I have a couple of links at home, writing this from a party I'm supposed to enjoy).

The real news in all of this, it seems to me, is how almost esoteric science (in a good sense) has made its way into mainstream journalism. And with the publishing of Magueijo's book, which will be among the more readable ones of its kind, being scheduled for 2003, there's certainly a hot issue to watch as it unfolds. Last, unlike with superstring theory (you know, the little elastics swinging in 10 or so dimensions, and whose detection is so many orders of magnitude away from current technology, it ain't funny anymore), VSL is going to get some experimental underpinnings in 2006 from NASA's GLAST (Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope) satellite.

Hey, with a little luck, who knows what the limit is going to be. It would be fucking amazing if we arrived at a correct Theory Of Everything within our lifetimes. Boy, what better issue for today.

Fine. Here's a link you ungrateful bastard.

developer.lanl.gov? I think you mean developer.apple.com.

Or, build your own Intel- or AMD-based computer that's cheaper, faster, and uses less power.

Not according to the guys who know what they're talking about.

Your AMD or Intel machine will not get anything close to the mips/watt ratio that the Transmeta does. The LANL people go on to conclude that the Transmeta is cheaper in the long run as well, because of power (including cooling) and space savings. Faster, I'll grant you, but one out of three is pretty poor batting, certainly not worth a moderation of 5.

For a cluster, the faster argument goes out the window as well, because the performance equation comes down to mips/watt, mips/cubic foot and mips/$$$, in all of which Transmeta leads AMD and Intel.

Now I don't know about you, but I find the monolithic, nuclear reactor core kind of box is getting less and less interesting as time goes by, and what I really want is a box full of much more efficient processors, all dirt-cheap of course. I'll admit that that there's no way for the typical home user to get into this kind of system for a price that competes with a single, Athlon or P4, but that's this year. Check again next year.

Wow, I didn't know they changed names (to a more PC system, or to bypass nanny-ware, I guess) to arXiv. I was going to point you to the XXX site on the net where geeks actually contribute the most to the action. But apparently these sites are one and the same.

There was a curious point in the article, with respect to a lawsuit versus Google. The idea presented was simple: as Google (currently, right now) provides an effective monopoly on a fundamental service of the net, it could be considered a public utility. I can begin to see how this argument could be persuasive, depending on the outcome of the next five years.

Without better understanding of the long-term implications of search engines and the legaly responsibilities such bodies have to their users and corresponding linked pages, it remains unclear whether any one service will ever truly take over for an extended period of time these services. Still, the hardware, software, and more general technical knowhow and intuition required to make Google what it is today is hard to duplicate. Furthermore, the combination of extensive searching, effective sorting, and caching means that Google is rapidly becoming the generalized equivlant of the preprint server xxx.lanl.gov, something the physics community now takes for granted and indeed, treats like a public utility.

When we come to rely upon Google to back up slashdotted servers and find any particular thing on the web, and have no effective alternatives for all of these, then it behoves us to treat it as a utility. There are certain egalitarian principles behind public utilities that are supportive of the general idea of "doing good", e.g. the gas company is required to provide heating service in certain neighborhoods during the winter, even to non-paying clients.

I think we would do well to consider the ways in which the public good can be served through such a company, allowing the effective merger of both the companies money-making prerequistes and the necessity of that company's service. Maybe that could provide an alternative solution to the "either we make money and sell our morals, or vice versa" problem Google seems to be facing.

Since I goofed on the last post, I'll add the obligatory links to:

CERN
The Enrico Fermi Institute
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratories
Agronne National Laboratories
Los Alamos National Laboratories

Yep, all the information you could want on modern Quantum Physics.

goto www.lanl.gov and click on the 'jobs' tab then the postdoc link.

here is one example:

Summary: Postdoctoral Positions in Protein Bioinformatics and Structural Genomics: The Bioscience Division (B-2 Group) is seeking 2-3 highly motivated researchers for immediate openings to work with our interdisciplinary team of Bioinformatics and Structural Biology. Research activities will focus on the development and application of methods in Functional and Structural Genomics, including: 1) inference of function in proteins based upon structural and sequence information; 2) prediction of protein structure, protein binding, ligands, and active sites using both ab initio approaches and experimental information; 3) identification of signatures of pathenogenosis; 4) annotation and analysis of selected genomes; and 5) creation and curation of annotated protein databases.

Required Skills:Experience in at least 2 of the following areas is required (more than two areas of experience is highly desirable):

• Protein structure modeling or protein-ligand analysis or other related modeling
• Background in molecular biology, or microbial pathogenesis, or related fields
• Experience with the common sequence analysis tools for Blast search, sequence alignment, phylogenetic analysis, etc.
• Drug design, or protein design or protein structure predictions or docking
• Functional annotation of putative genes based on literature analysis
• Curation of biological databases and web programming

For general information refer to the Postdoctoral Program page.

goto www.lanl.gov and click on the 'jobs' tab then the postdoc link.

here is one example:

Summary: Postdoctoral Positions in Protein Bioinformatics and Structural Genomics: The Bioscience Division (B-2 Group) is seeking 2-3 highly motivated researchers for immediate openings to work with our interdisciplinary team of Bioinformatics and Structural Biology. Research activities will focus on the development and application of methods in Functional and Structural Genomics, including: 1) inference of function in proteins based upon structural and sequence information; 2) prediction of protein structure, protein binding, ligands, and active sites using both ab initio approaches and experimental information; 3) identification of signatures of pathenogenosis; 4) annotation and analysis of selected genomes; and 5) creation and curation of annotated protein databases.

Required Skills:Experience in at least 2 of the following areas is required (more than two areas of experience is highly desirable):

• Protein structure modeling or protein-ligand analysis or other related modeling
• Background in molecular biology, or microbial pathogenesis, or related fields
• Experience with the common sequence analysis tools for Blast search, sequence alignment, phylogenetic analysis, etc.
• Drug design, or protein design or protein structure predictions or docking
• Functional annotation of putative genes based on literature analysis
• Curation of biological databases and web programming

For general information refer to the Postdoctoral Program page.

goto www.lanl.gov and click on the 'jobs' tab then the postdoc link.

here is one example:

Summary: Postdoctoral Positions in Protein Bioinformatics and Structural Genomics: The Bioscience Division (B-2 Group) is seeking 2-3 highly motivated researchers for immediate openings to work with our interdisciplinary team of Bioinformatics and Structural Biology. Research activities will focus on the development and application of methods in Functional and Structural Genomics, including: 1) inference of function in proteins based upon structural and sequence information; 2) prediction of protein structure, protein binding, ligands, and active sites using both ab initio approaches and experimental information; 3) identification of signatures of pathenogenosis; 4) annotation and analysis of selected genomes; and 5) creation and curation of annotated protein databases.

Required Skills:Experience in at least 2 of the following areas is required (more than two areas of experience is highly desirable):

• Protein structure modeling or protein-ligand analysis or other related modeling
• Background in molecular biology, or microbial pathogenesis, or related fields
• Experience with the common sequence analysis tools for Blast search, sequence alignment, phylogenetic analysis, etc.
• Drug design, or protein design or protein structure predictions or docking
• Functional annotation of putative genes based on literature analysis
• Curation of biological databases and web programming

For general information refer to the Postdoctoral Program page.

goto www.lanl.gov and click on the 'jobs' tab then the postdoc link.

here is one example:

Summary: Postdoctoral Positions in Protein Bioinformatics and Structural Genomics: The Bioscience Division (B-2 Group) is seeking 2-3 highly motivated researchers for immediate openings to work with our interdisciplinary team of Bioinformatics and Structural Biology. Research activities will focus on the development and application of methods in Functional and Structural Genomics, including: 1) inference of function in proteins based upon structural and sequence information; 2) prediction of protein structure, protein binding, ligands, and active sites using both ab initio approaches and experimental information; 3) identification of signatures of pathenogenosis; 4) annotation and analysis of selected genomes; and 5) creation and curation of annotated protein databases.

Required Skills:Experience in at least 2 of the following areas is required (more than two areas of experience is highly desirable):

• Protein structure modeling or protein-ligand analysis or other related modeling
• Background in molecular biology, or microbial pathogenesis, or related fields
• Experience with the common sequence analysis tools for Blast search, sequence alignment, phylogenetic analysis, etc.
• Drug design, or protein design or protein structure predictions or docking
• Functional annotation of putative genes based on literature analysis
• Curation of biological databases and web programming

For general information refer to the Postdoctoral Program page.

goto www.lanl.gov and click on the 'jobs' tab then the postdoc link.

here is one example:

Summary: Postdoctoral Positions in Protein Bioinformatics and Structural Genomics: The Bioscience Division (B-2 Group) is seeking 2-3 highly motivated researchers for immediate openings to work with our interdisciplinary team of Bioinformatics and Structural Biology. Research activities will focus on the development and application of methods in Functional and Structural Genomics, including: 1) inference of function in proteins based upon structural and sequence information; 2) prediction of protein structure, protein binding, ligands, and active sites using both ab initio approaches and experimental information; 3) identification of signatures of pathenogenosis; 4) annotation and analysis of selected genomes; and 5) creation and curation of annotated protein databases.

Required Skills:Experience in at least 2 of the following areas is required (more than two areas of experience is highly desirable):

• Protein structure modeling or protein-ligand analysis or other related modeling
• Background in molecular biology, or microbial pathogenesis, or related fields
• Experience with the common sequence analysis tools for Blast search, sequence alignment, phylogenetic analysis, etc.
• Drug design, or protein design or protein structure predictions or docking
• Functional annotation of putative genes based on literature analysis
• Curation of biological databases and web programming

For general information refer to the Postdoctoral Program page.

-------

Here's the executive summary: CPUs consume more electricity when actively computing than they do when idle. To solve the RC5-72 challenge may require an additional 2 million tons of coal be burned in order to produce the additional electricity required. That's over 200 full coal trains. 9.2 billion pounds of additional carbon dioxide will be produced and released. The details follow.

I sent a letter to my buddies during a discussion of relaunching our team to attack the RC5-72 challenge. It showed a simplistic estimation of the energy costs required for me to participate in the challenge. I know that my CPU uses more energy to perform math calculations than it does to sit idle. It has since occurred to me that not only would I be burning an extra megawatt or two of electricity during the contest to participate, but so would all the other participants.

I've researched things a bit more since then. The distributed.net speed page shows an Athlon 1GHz Thunderbird averaging 3,540,087 keys/sec, or 12,744,313,200 keys/hour during the RC5-64 contest. A hardware vendor's page shows an active Athlon 1GHz Thunderbird CPU consumes an extra 10 watt-hours above its standby level. This is only the difference between an active CPU and an idle CPU, and does not account for any other standby power savings that may or may not take place. That means a 1GHz Athlon Thunderbird participating in the contest can either sit idle or test 1,275 million keys at a cost of one additional watt-hour. Since the RC5-64 contest tested 15,769,938,165,961,326,592 keys, at this rate that is 12,368,578,953 additional watt-hours used. That means about 12 gigawatt-hours (gWH) of additional electrical power were produced and consumed over the last four years just to solve the contest.

This Los Alamos National Laboratory web page provided lots of data regarding coal and electrical generation. Referring to only the 1998 figures, I found that U.S. electric generators required 10,311 BTU to generate one kilowatt-hour. If the contest required 12 gWH of additional electricity, it must have taken about 123,732 million BTUs to generate it. Bituminous coal yields 24 million BTU per ton; sub-bituminous coal yields only 17 million BTU per ton. In 1998, the US was mining and burning about a 47%/53% mix, averaging out to about 20.5 million BTU/ton. Therefore 6,036 tons of coal had to be burned in order to generate that much eletricity. Over sixty railroad cars of coal. Looking at the CO2 problem, at the reported U.S. average of 208 lbs of CO2 produced per million BTU generated by burning coal, the contest was responsible for the production and emission of about 26 million pounds of carbon dioxide.

When it comes to the RC5-72 contest the numbers get even worse, since according to the RC5-72 speed page the number of keys per second drops to about 72% of the RC5-64 cracking speed for the Athlon 1GHz Thunderbird. Assuming that this 72% ratio is similar across most architectures, extrapolating the contest to RC5-72 should require about 2^8 times as much of everything to solve at 72% efficiency, or about 356 times the RC5-64 figures. 12 gWH * 356 is 4.3 terawatt-hours. 6,036 tons * 356 is over 2 million tons of coal. More than 210 full trains. 26 * 356 is about 9.2 billion pounds of carbon dioxide that will be produced.

Now, these numbers are pretty much long-range projections made from some small, narrow observations. Not every CPU will consume 10 additional watts when busy. And not every CPU would otherwise drop to an idle or standby state. But some computers will be left on and cracking keys rather than hibernating or being powered off, which could save 116 watts/hour or more. And some may consume more than 10 extra watt-hours when active; such as a Pentium III-667 MHz which consumes 34 watt-hours operating but only 5 watt-hours when it can drop to standby.

Also, only about 56% of our electricity is generated by burning coal: the rest is produced by nuclear power, or burning natural gas, fuel oil or biomass; about 10% is produced by renewable resources. The key could be found tomorrow, or it could be found 15 years from now. So my estimates are still just that: estimates. I could be wrong by orders of magnitude, but even so, the fact is that the RC5-72 contest is going to increase electricity consumption. Over the course of its life, the RC5-72 contest might be responsible for burning only 100 tons of coal, or it might cause the burn of 4 billion tons of coal.

-------

And for those of you are still reading and haven't been bored by all the numbers, I think it would have cost me about $850.00 worth of electricity to personally participate. The prize is $10,000, $1,000 of which goes to distributed.net, $8,000 goes to a charitable organization of distributed.net's choosing (the EFF, I think) and $1,000 goes to the person whose machine found the winning key.

That's an $850 investment for a 1/165,000,000,000 chance of winning $1,000 in the next 10 years. That's discounting

• rising electric costs
• devaluation of the dollar due to inflation
• the chances that RSA will still be in business and able to pay the $10,000 reward in 10 years.

• I think my money would be MUCH safer invested in lottery tickets, where I've heard that investments pay out about $0.11 on the dollar (average.)

There are several Heat pipe patents that were granted the the late George Grover. Via his association with Q-Dot corporation.

Interestingly, I seem to recall that one of the patents had to do with a tilt control mechanism that regulated the efficiency of the thermal transfer (the heat pipes would operate more efficiently at certain horizontal attitudes).

Organic - Contains Carbon
Inorganic - Doesn't contain Carbon

If these self-contained replicating machines were silcon/nitrogen-based or something else other than carbon, then they would technically be classified as inorganic. It was believed that silicon can be used to create compounds similar to organic compounds. It could have been the beginning.

Global Cooling on the otherhand produce rival products to Medis El based on the Free piston Stirling Engine.

Despite being some impressive technology, Free Piston Stirling Engines haven't really been taken up to well. Its a shame because they do seem to be much more efficient.

If you are really interested then you might want to check this out At Ames Lab. Gschneidner's work on the giant magnetocaloric effect is REALLY impressive. Its all about the exchange of entropy between magnetic and kinetic forms. Damn cool.

Many thermoacoustic refrigerators are really variations on the Stirling engine that use standing pressure waves in place of the pistons (http://civil.colorado.edu/~muehleis/thermoacs/the rmoacs.html, http://www.lanl.gov/mst/engine).

Los Alamos national lab currently holds the record on using thermal acoustic engine. The thermal efficient of their engine is about 30 percent, compare that to automobile engine. which is about 25 percent. http://www.lanl.gov/projects/thermoacoustics/TASHE .html

It was developed at Los Alamos.

I have been waiting for this for ages. I first read the paper by Backhaus and Swift (and here is a more recent one) four years ago, and whichever site that directed my attention to that "promised" commercialization in the near future. Not exactly swift in high tech time, but still very much welcomed.

Too bad I just bought a fridge for my dorm room. )=

Werd

I have been waiting for this for ages. I first read the paper by Backhaus and Swift (and here is a more recent one) four years ago, and whichever site that directed my attention to that "promised" commercialization in the near future. Not exactly swift in high tech time, but still very much welcomed.

Too bad I just bought a fridge for my dorm room. )=

Werd

It probably happens most often when the climate control conks out where ever the servers are stored, especially when there are many servers. Like here.

I have to wonder what type of redundancy and error correction will have to be built into quantum computing.

Lots and lots. In 1995 Peter Shor (the factoring guy) and Robert Calderbank devised that possiblethe first error correcting code for quantum computers. Many others have been designed, including proposals for some that operate as a natural consequence of the system being used. Here is a good survey of the field.

It has been shown that if the error rate is below a certain threshold (currently estimated to be one error per 103 operations for optimists, and one per 106 per pessimists) then efficient error corrected quantum computation is possible. The pessimistic estimate is well above what is currently possible experimentally in quantum systems but the problem seems to be an engineering one, not a fundamental one. It should eventually be possible with clever implementations of qubits, shielding and cooling to near absolute zero.

I have to wonder what type of redundancy and error correction will have to be built into quantum computing.

Lots and lots. In 1995 Peter Shor (the factoring guy) and Robert Calderbank devised that possiblethe first error correcting code for quantum computers. Many others have been designed, including proposals for some that operate as a natural consequence of the system being used. Here is a good survey of the field.

It has been shown that if the error rate is below a certain threshold (currently estimated to be one error per 103 operations for optimists, and one per 106 per pessimists) then efficient error corrected quantum computation is possible. The pessimistic estimate is well above what is currently possible experimentally in quantum systems but the problem seems to be an engineering one, not a fundamental one. It should eventually be possible with clever implementations of qubits, shielding and cooling to near absolute zero.

Well, good luck in trying to avoid Phoenix (the company) in the future. Trying to avoid a particular BIOS company is like trying to avoid books with a certain type of paper.

In the long run, closed-source BIOSes have to be replaced by open source ones anyway, for a variety of reasons, such stability, flexibility, usability, security, etc. In other words, all the same reasons that made it necessary to replace proprietary operating systems with open ones.

This trend is already beginning.

they used regular Shuttle XPC SS51G [shuttleonline.com] Mini-PCs

Has anyone actually read the links? This isn't the linuxBios project, it's a seperate project that adds 'trusted boot' to it.

From the umd site:
"Upon the completion of our research, open and closed source operating systems will have a high assurance bootstrap process available on a wide array of personal computer systems. In addition, the bootstrap process will include the capability for using cryptographic hardware-- in some cases tamper resistant. Providing a ``true'' trusted path from the power switch to the Operating System."

Sound familliar?

Since these are the guys that did most of the original work on LinuxBIOS, does that mean that they have ported linuxbios to the Shuttle XPC SS51G motherboard? I would love a P4 2.5GHz PC that boots into linux in about 3 seconds!

What a shame... who cares about trees ?
We are not freaking elves... we're geeks... give us such stories
/me 's going to craft a beowulf claster of trees and then sell it to Microsoft for ??? Profit?
Oh.. wait... my story submission marked as accepted now... heheheh... those slashdot editors quick as radiated elves
*mumbling and scratching head*

Lab spokesman James Rickman says small sections at the bottom of the canyon, formerly known as Technical Area 10, were used from the 1940s until 1961 as test sites by scientists studying explosions.

Rickman says it's not really that there's a risk, but the lab wanted to point that out.

OK: I don't have a shuttle small form factor case right now, and perhaps I never will, but a question for all six of the other people in the world without one: Can you look at the picture (right hand side) at the LANL space simulator page without lusting at least a little bit for a shuttle case? :)

What I'd really like though is a case that small but with a cool-running, low-power chip, for low noise and even better for low power consumption.

Shuttle eventually gave in and came out with SFF cases for AMD chips; what about for Transmeta, esp. the new Astro? :) (Or even VIA's low-power stuff ...)

For reasons of paranoia and inertia, I have (and anticipate continuing to have) several computers around the house. They might all end up being laptops, but that gets expensive, too. I'd rather save space and utility bills by making my multiple computers small and frugal :)

timothy

The Los Alamos National Laboratory is building a supercomputer based on a Beowulf Cluster with 1024 nodes (2 processor in each node). You can read the story here or in this Slashdot thread.

Uh...they're decommissioned and given to the schools.
The schools in the area around Los Alamos, NM. have more technology than they know what to do with....

Did YOUR highschool have a "Supercomputer Challenge"??

This is not such a dumb question. The LinuxBIOS project was started by and for the Los Alamos National Lab. One of the nifty things this allows them to do is change Kernel without taking the machines down. You can then switch to a kernel compiled for different purposes.

This is not such a dumb question. The LinuxBIOS project was started by and for the Los Alamos National Lab. One of the nifty things this allows them to do is change Kernel without taking the machines down. You can then switch to a kernel compiled for different purposes.

Is that old news as it was posted in July on CNET, here which reportedly had 962 nodes and was/is an "Evolocity" cluster.

Is this one for the sister lab(LANL):
A powerful new 2,048-processor, $6 million Linux supercomputer is being built for the Los Alamos National Laboratory to run unclassified analyses and ... (NetworX built it with 959 nodes and 2050 processors) in-addition-to "Pink" named after "Pink"
-or- it it "Pink"
-or- is the post about another one that going to LLNL and has nothing to do with "Pink"?

Is that 2, 3 or 4 this year?

This is getting strange.

Extreme Linux at http://www.extremelinux.org/ seems to have vaporized (behind the LANL firewall, I suppose).

It also seems kind of odd that LinuxBIOS is not mentioned in these articles and is, IMO, a critical part of the builds as well as being an outstandingly innovative use of the Linux kernel.

I think I need a Beowulf cluster to figure this out and tell me ?WHY? LLNL and LANL are suddenly in need of more SC's that are in addition to the ones that they already have. :?)

Using linuxbios perhaps? :-)

cnn article

infoworld article

Here's a link directly to a page w/in LANL and just for the heck of it a little something from google.

Standard Disclaimer + I work for RLX.

I don't know if things have changed much in the past year, but last I heard it was because companies are paranoid and don't want to share adequate documentation necessary to make LinuxBIOS a success for both cluster applications and home users. Video chipset makers like nVidia and ATi wouldn't tell them how to initialize VGA BIOS, AMD wouldn't tell them how to initialize L2 cache on the Athlons. Setbacks in documentation. About the only company who's not a bunch of jerks to these guys is SiS... Click here to see a list of their working motherboards. I'm tempted to get a K7SEM just to see how well it works in it's current state.

If you go to this page you will see an announcement for the cluster.

And I quote: "We will call it Pink."

...here, quickly improved it to 0.5 and 1 km, and then 10 km. Don't quite know why Nature thought this particular paper was so revolutionary -- wake me when they get to about 300 km, the minimal bounce-off-satellite trip.

...here, quickly improved it to 0.5 and 1 km, and then 10 km. Don't quite know why Nature thought this particular paper was so revolutionary -- wake me when they get to about 300 km, the minimal bounce-off-satellite trip.

...here, quickly improved it to 0.5 and 1 km, and then 10 km. Don't quite know why Nature thought this particular paper was so revolutionary -- wake me when they get to about 300 km, the minimal bounce-off-satellite trip.