But CERN's intranet is also readily searchable and apart from the technical details on the new LHC accelerator (which are publically available and make great geek reading) I also find this further information on the AD (Antiproton Decelerator), which makes the trapping of antiparticles possible.
It's a nightmare to be trapped in one. I'm on a good label (Epitaph) now that's not part of the plantation system. But all the old records I did for Island have been swallowed up and spit out in whatever form they choose.
But Epitaph is a member of the RIAA: http://www.riaa.org/About-Members-1.cfm
Over the last few months I've wanted to buy a few new CDs, but each time I look up the label and find that they're in the RIAA, so I've refused to buy it.
What to do? Is there a way to avoid the label? To buy the music without supporting the label?
Or are labels like "Epitaph" good-guys, without any power to avoid RIAA's politics?
The following document probably has a certain bias (it's prepared by the Uranium Information Centre), but I've found it to be an excellent discussion of the world's energy requirements in general, and electricity and nuclear power in detail.
Good explanations of the pros and cons of different energy sources, as well as explaining which sources are appropriate for base-load and peak-load electricity production. Read this and you'll understand why Denmark isn't aiming for 50% of their power from wind.
http://www.uic.com.au/ne.htm
Warning, it's quite long. Hit sections 2 and 6 for the high-points of alternative energy sources.
Currently, computers cannot, and will not, simply fit in with home entertainment setups. There are several reasons why:
Damn. I thought mine fit pretty well. Here's why:
1. Inconvenient input devices
IR-receiver, 15 Euro. Old remote-control, free. LIRC software, free. Controls every media-related Linux application I want to use.
2. Appearance
My media-server is in the basement. Audio, video, and serial cables run to the lounge. The only presence in the lounge is the IR-receiver (tiny), although I intend to add a LCD display in an external drive-case at sometime in the future.
3. Graphics systems
Yes, a TV-out conneciton is pretty much a requirement, but not as hard to find as you seem to assume.
4. Noise
Already covered by remote location of the PC. I should add the the disadvantage of having the PC elsewhere is having to leave the room to change the DVD/CD. Problem solved by ripping the discs to your hard-drive.
5. Squeezing it all in the box
Not as hard as you might think. I use a DVB card, which includes digital TV receiver, MPEG2 decoder, external video connection, SPDIF audio out. High-power processors are only really required for on-the-fly format conversion. Large HDs are readily available. Probably most important is a good case to keep your disks nice and cool.
6. Not many people want one
You mean that you don't know many people who want one. Or know that they want one.
Tivo is cool, right? What if you could expand your Tivo's disk space by as much as you could afford to buy new disks? Add additional receiver-cards to be able to record as many channels at once as you wanted?
Add a DVD-ROM drive and play DVD's through it, or buffer your DVDs to disk?
Play CDs and MP3s through it? How about AVIs, as well as keeping up with whatever new codecs come out?
Then your needs would be well served by a general purpose computer, not some consumer device which is destined for obsolecence within 3 years.
Another poster mentioned the poor integration between different software. Take a look at VDR for Linux - it does all of what I've mentioned above, and more. How about an image viewer, for bvrowsing your photo collection? All there, and fully integrated.
As a student of Dharma, you know that people should refrain from speaking untruths.
Do you think it's a good idea to teach your child that it's okay to stand, with your hand over your heart (or whatever it is that you do - I'm not an American) and recite an oath/pledge, while actually pledging something else to yourself?
I must admit that I also find the whole pledge rather creepy, and knowing the child that I was, I probably would have refused to say it.:)
Today I believe that moral guidance is good, but not in such a heavy-handed way. Has the pledge helped? What is the result of every child having had to say this pledge daily? Are Americans better then Europeans?
When I was a boy-scout, we originally had to swear to do our "duty to God". I believe this was changed at some point to doing "duty to my god", which I found more palatable. Such a simple change probably can't be made to the pledge, though.
These machines tend to be clusters of smaller machines. IBM's SP architecture, for example, runs AIX which doesn't need to scale particularly well.
The magic in SP is partly hardware (high-speed interconnect between nodes), partly the admin software which allows admin tasks to be run simultaneously of many nodes (a non-negligible task), and is otherwise left up to the application programmers to use MPI or similar to get the application to run over the cluster.
Single system images typically don't scale this large. Cray's UNICOS/mk (Unix variant) is a microkernel version of the UNICOS OS, used on the T3E and it's predecessors, where a microkernel runs on each node, obviously incurring some overhead, but avoiding bottlenecks that otherwise occur as you scale. Here's some info. Last time I checked, T3E scaled to 2048 processors.
Out of the box, SGI's IRIX scales very nicely up to 128-256 processors. Beyond that "IRIX XXL" is used (up to 1024 processors, to date). This is no longer considered to be a general purpose OS!
IRIX replicates kernel text across nodes for speed, and kernel structures are allocated locally wherever possible. But getting write access to global kernel structures (some performance counters, for example) becomes a bottle-neck as the system scales.
IRIX XXL works around these bottle-necks, presumably sacrificing some features in the process. Sorry, I can't find a good link on IRIX scalability.
Hate to nit-pick, but what does that mean? As far as I can see, every machine SGI has produced since (and including) the O2 has PCI slots, either standard or as an option.
Interesting to me is that SGI have promised to release a whole slew of new graphics machines in the near future, of which this seems to be the first.
I've got to admit that while the Fuel looks reasonable, I'm hanging out to see what real innovations come out of this. Maybe
this?
Check out http://www.linuxtv.org or http://www.linuxdvb.tv for information about the DVB project, which is attempting to develop Linux digital-TV apps/drivers as well as to keep digital TV open.
Note that the company formed to develop the DVB driver (Convergence) is in financial difficulty and could fold soon.
Given that Linux is an obvious choice for set-top-boxes, and that many manufacturers want to make their own implementations closed (although the DVB standard seems to be prevailing at the moment), this could be the venue for a future battleground between open and closed source.
This makes sense, but unfortunately it reduces this conversation to simply "RAM is cheaper - read caches on disks should be made larger as a result), which is nowhere near as sexy as a solid-state disk.
Most people are not going to want to use this extra memory as a write-cache, as the danger of losing-data / corrupting-your-filesystem in a power failure is too great.
I think the bottom line concerining solid-state disks is that a solution which was 100% solid-state and was power-failure safe would not be cost effective against simply installing more RAM considering that most Unix's today do good filesystem buffering - why mirror your disk to a RAM-disk when the data is kept in main memory anyway?
With the sgi, the speed of accessing memory on the local board or boards in the same cabinet is much faster than hits to memory in remote cabinets.
...
The difference is that under COMA, if a cpu requests a particular bit of memory a lot, that page is either migrated or copied to a memory bank on that cpu's memory board
No difference there. SGI also do page replication and page migration.
Also, "one big system with 1836 cpu's and 9.7TB of ram"? On a monolithic kernel that has only just for the first time run on more than 64 CPUs? Sorry, I just can't see this getting off the ground.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, CERN's press release is much more informative than the BBC article.
But CERN's intranet is also readily searchable and apart from the technical details on the new LHC accelerator (which are publically available and make great geek reading) I also find
this further information on the AD (Antiproton Decelerator), which makes the trapping of antiparticles possible.
In the article, Tom Waits is quoted as saying:
It's a nightmare to be trapped in one. I'm on a good label (Epitaph) now that's not part of the plantation system. But all the old records I did for Island have been swallowed up and spit out in whatever form they choose.
But Epitaph is a member of the RIAA:
http://www.riaa.org/About-Members-1.cfm
Over the last few months I've wanted to buy a few new CDs, but each time I look up the label and find that they're in the RIAA, so I've refused to buy it.
What to do? Is there a way to avoid the label? To buy the music without supporting the label?
Or are labels like "Epitaph" good-guys, without any power to avoid RIAA's politics?
Way back in 1998, SGI benchmarked an XFS(IRIX) filesystem at over 7 GB/s.
:) If not, I'm sure they've improved speeds over the last 5 years...
e /x fs_white_paper.html
No, that's not a typo. They also managed over 4GB/s to a single file.
Is that enough for you?
This link describes some more about the disk benchmark.
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/papers/xfs_whit
The following document probably has a certain bias (it's prepared by the Uranium Information Centre), but I've found it to be an excellent discussion of the world's energy requirements in general, and electricity and nuclear power in detail.
Good explanations of the pros and cons of different energy sources, as well as explaining which sources are appropriate for base-load and peak-load electricity production. Read this and you'll understand why Denmark isn't aiming for 50% of their power from wind.
http://www.uic.com.au/ne.htm
Warning, it's quite long. Hit sections 2 and 6 for the high-points of alternative energy sources.
Currently, computers cannot, and will not, simply fit in with home entertainment setups. There are several reasons why:
Damn. I thought mine fit pretty well. Here's why:
1. Inconvenient input devices
IR-receiver, 15 Euro. Old remote-control, free. LIRC software, free. Controls every media-related Linux application I want to use.
2. Appearance
My media-server is in the basement. Audio, video, and serial cables run to the lounge. The only presence in the lounge is the IR-receiver (tiny), although I intend to add a LCD display in an external drive-case at sometime in the future.
3. Graphics systems
Yes, a TV-out conneciton is pretty much a requirement, but not as hard to find as you seem to assume.
4. Noise
Already covered by remote location of the PC. I should add the the disadvantage of having the PC elsewhere is having to leave the room to change the DVD/CD. Problem solved by ripping the discs to your hard-drive.
5. Squeezing it all in the box
Not as hard as you might think. I use a DVB card, which includes digital TV receiver, MPEG2 decoder, external video connection, SPDIF audio out. High-power processors are only really required for on-the-fly format conversion. Large HDs are readily available. Probably most important is a good case to keep your disks nice and cool.
6. Not many people want one
You mean that you don't know many people who want one. Or know that they want one.
Tivo is cool, right? What if you could expand your Tivo's disk space by as much as you could afford to buy new disks? Add additional receiver-cards to be able to record as many channels at once as you wanted?
Add a DVD-ROM drive and play DVD's through it, or buffer your DVDs to disk?
Play CDs and MP3s through it? How about AVIs, as well as keeping up with whatever new codecs come out?
Then your needs would be well served by a general purpose computer, not some consumer device which is destined for obsolecence within 3 years.
Another poster mentioned the poor integration between different software. Take a look at VDR for Linux - it does all of what I've mentioned above, and more. How about an image viewer, for bvrowsing your photo collection? All there, and fully integrated.
As a student of Dharma, you know that people should refrain from speaking untruths.
:)
Do you think it's a good idea to teach your child that it's okay to stand, with your hand over your heart (or whatever it is that you do - I'm not an American) and recite an oath/pledge, while actually pledging something else to yourself?
I must admit that I also find the whole pledge rather creepy, and knowing the child that I was, I probably would have refused to say it.
Today I believe that moral guidance is good, but not in such a heavy-handed way. Has the pledge helped? What is the result of every child having had to say this pledge daily? Are Americans better then Europeans?
When I was a boy-scout, we originally had to swear to do our "duty to God". I believe this was changed at some point to doing "duty to my god", which I found more palatable. Such a simple change probably can't be made to the pledge, though.
These machines tend to be clusters of smaller machines. IBM's SP architecture, for example, runs AIX which doesn't need to scale particularly well.
The magic in SP is partly hardware (high-speed interconnect between nodes), partly the admin software which allows admin tasks to be run simultaneously of many nodes (a non-negligible task), and is otherwise left up to the application programmers to use MPI or similar to get the application to run over the cluster.
Single system images typically don't scale this large. Cray's UNICOS/mk (Unix variant) is a microkernel version of the UNICOS OS, used on the T3E and it's predecessors, where a microkernel runs on each node, obviously incurring some overhead, but avoiding bottlenecks that otherwise occur as you scale. Here's some info. Last time I checked, T3E scaled to 2048 processors.
Out of the box, SGI's IRIX scales very nicely up to 128-256 processors. Beyond that "IRIX XXL" is used (up to 1024 processors, to date). This is no longer considered to be a general purpose OS!
IRIX replicates kernel text across nodes for speed, and kernel structures are allocated locally wherever possible. But getting write access to global kernel structures (some performance counters, for example) becomes a bottle-neck as the system scales.
IRIX XXL works around these bottle-necks, presumably sacrificing some features in the process. Sorry, I can't find a good link on IRIX scalability.
The fact is that "kilo-" means 1000, "mega-", 1000000, and "giga-" 1000000000. They're defined that way. _That's_ a standard.
You want to explain why base-10 figures shouldn't be used. Other than calling it "silly", and blaming it in marketing, that is?
The team you list includes a number of people working on NUMA for Linux.
:)
I know that SGI is also working on getting Linux running on their NUMA architecture.
To what extent are your groups working together on NUMA? Your answer is going to say a lot about the value of Open Source...
...and a PCI bus (finally).
Hate to nit-pick, but what does that mean? As far as I can see, every machine SGI has produced since (and including) the
O2 has PCI slots, either standard or as an option.
Interesting to me is that SGI have promised to release a whole slew of new graphics machines in the near future, of which this seems to be the first.
I've got to admit that while the Fuel looks reasonable, I'm hanging out to see what real innovations come out of this. Maybe
this?
Check out http://www.linuxtv.org or http://www.linuxdvb.tv for information about the DVB project, which is attempting to develop Linux digital-TV apps/drivers as well as to keep digital TV open.
Note that the company formed to develop the DVB driver (Convergence) is in financial difficulty and could fold soon.
Given that Linux is an obvious choice for set-top-boxes, and that many manufacturers want to make their own implementations closed (although the DVB standard seems to be prevailing at the moment), this could be the venue for a future battleground between open and closed source.
mtb
This makes sense, but unfortunately it reduces this conversation to simply "RAM is cheaper - read caches on disks should be made larger as a result), which is nowhere near as sexy as a solid-state disk.
Most people are not going to want to use this extra memory as a write-cache, as the danger of losing-data / corrupting-your-filesystem in a power failure is too great.
I think the bottom line concerining solid-state disks is that a solution which was 100% solid-state and was power-failure safe would not be cost effective against simply installing more RAM considering that most Unix's today do good filesystem buffering - why mirror your disk to a RAM-disk when the data is kept in main memory anyway?
With the sgi, the speed of accessing memory on the local board or boards in the same cabinet is much faster than hits to memory in remote cabinets.
...
The difference is that under COMA, if a cpu requests a particular bit of memory a lot, that page is either migrated or copied to a memory bank on that cpu's memory board
No difference there. SGI also do page replication and page migration.
Also, "one big system with 1836 cpu's and 9.7TB of ram"? On a monolithic kernel that has only just for the first time run on more than 64 CPUs? Sorry, I just can't see this getting off the ground.
Since it seems that no-one dares to moderate "off-topic" today, let me throw this in:
. ht ml
http://www.akamai.com/html/en/nr/press/press292
(both "News for nerds" and "stuff that matters", but hopelessly off-topic...)