As a user of a Sectera GSM phone, I'd have to say I was a bit disappointed when I got it that it seemed straight out of 2001: one color display, complicated interface, poor form factor. Other than being able to go secure, it's not that great a phone IMHO. I've never used the Sectera handheld, but I would guess if RIM could pull off a secure BB solution they'd have a leg up on the Sectera just from a form-fits-function standpoint.
I once worked at an unnamed institution which had a large Windoze network and some smaller "research" Linux labs. Just like everyone else's story for the most part the IT guys didn't have a clue about the Linux side of things. For some reason, which I could never figure out, trying to connect to people's Windoze home directories through SAMBA (smbmount) would never work properly--we'd always get some weird auth error or something. Just for kicks I tried to smb://hostname/share one day with Nautilus and it worked without complalint. Don't ask, don't tell I guess, but it sure saved some hassle transfering large files from host to host.
The real problem in predicting these problems is the size of the scales involved in the solution. A weather simulation is a numerical solution to the full Navier-Stokes equations, which are a (very) non-linear system of partial differential equations. They are the same equations that describe most (newtonian) fluid motion. They can be solved directly (google Direct Numerical Simulation) but the resolution of the grid required scales with Reynolds Number to the 9/5 power. For a model of, say, the US, you could only imagine that the length scale (and hence Reynolds number) would be HUGE, and the number of grid points would be astronomical. What next? The solution that has been most often used is to simulate some of the non-linear behavior with models. As any scientist can tell you, all models are wrong (just some are better than others). The last few decades have been great for the compuatational fluid dynamics community since faster and larger computers allow us to solve more difficult problems. Right now people are running DNS models of simple flows, but large and complex flows are not yet viable. Until things get a lot faster, we'll be stuck with bad predictions.
As others have already noted, this isn't a SETI-type problem. Whereas SETI has a large amount of data that must be parsed, analyized, etc. individually, a CFD simulation requires inter-node communication, meaning each portion of the solution that is running in parallel must be able to communicate with other portions. For a distributed environment, sometimes things like gigabit ethernet just aren't fast enough--hence the market for myrinet and infininet. Many times for a complex problem bandwidth is more of an issue than processor muscle.
FORTRAN is the pretty much the standard language in the computational fluid dynamics community (CFD) which includes everything from large-scale weather predictions to small scale turbulent motion. Why? Because for crunching numbers, nothing comes close to the speed of an optimized FORTRAN program. A numerical simulation requires very little non-numerical computation (i.e. little to no I/O). As previously mentioned, it's all loops and math operations. In their (very very) simplest form, weather simulations are nothing more than a numerical solution to a system of very non-linear Partial Differential Equations. Give it a grid, some initial conditions, and turn the crank.
"My reason for looking into this was that I need to produce long technical documents as PDF files."
Why not just use LaTeX? Since PDF is native to Mac, PDFLaTeX seems (to me) to be the best solution. I've been using TeXShop for a few years now and have really enjoyed it. Sure, you don't get the GUI of an Office "suite", but I think the results speak for themselves.
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As a user of a Sectera GSM phone, I'd have to say I was a bit disappointed when I got it that it seemed straight out of 2001: one color display, complicated interface, poor form factor. Other than being able to go secure, it's not that great a phone IMHO. I've never used the Sectera handheld, but I would guess if RIM could pull off a secure BB solution they'd have a leg up on the Sectera just from a form-fits-function standpoint.
I once worked at an unnamed institution which had a large Windoze network and some smaller "research" Linux labs. Just like everyone else's story for the most part the IT guys didn't have a clue about the Linux side of things. For some reason, which I could never figure out, trying to connect to people's Windoze home directories through SAMBA (smbmount) would never work properly--we'd always get some weird auth error or something. Just for kicks I tried to smb://hostname/share one day with Nautilus and it worked without complalint. Don't ask, don't tell I guess, but it sure saved some hassle transfering large files from host to host.
The real problem in predicting these problems is the size of the scales involved in the solution. A weather simulation is a numerical solution to the full Navier-Stokes equations, which are a (very) non-linear system of partial differential equations. They are the same equations that describe most (newtonian) fluid motion. They can be solved directly (google Direct Numerical Simulation) but the resolution of the grid required scales with Reynolds Number to the 9/5 power. For a model of, say, the US, you could only imagine that the length scale (and hence Reynolds number) would be HUGE, and the number of grid points would be astronomical. What next?
The solution that has been most often used is to simulate some of the non-linear behavior with models. As any scientist can tell you, all models are wrong (just some are better than others). The last few decades have been great for the compuatational fluid dynamics community since faster and larger computers allow us to solve more difficult problems. Right now people are running DNS models of simple flows, but large and complex flows are not yet viable. Until things get a lot faster, we'll be stuck with bad predictions.
As others have already noted, this isn't a SETI-type problem. Whereas SETI has a large amount of data that must be parsed, analyized, etc. individually, a CFD simulation requires inter-node communication, meaning each portion of the solution that is running in parallel must be able to communicate with other portions. For a distributed environment, sometimes things like gigabit ethernet just aren't fast enough--hence the market for myrinet and infininet. Many times for a complex problem bandwidth is more of an issue than processor muscle.
FORTRAN is the pretty much the standard language in the computational fluid dynamics community (CFD) which includes everything from large-scale weather predictions to small scale turbulent motion. Why? Because for crunching numbers, nothing comes close to the speed of an optimized FORTRAN program. A numerical simulation requires very little non-numerical computation (i.e. little to no I/O). As previously mentioned, it's all loops and math operations. In their (very very) simplest form, weather simulations are nothing more than a numerical solution to a system of very non-linear Partial Differential Equations. Give it a grid, some initial conditions, and turn the crank.
"My reason for looking into this was that I need to produce long technical documents as PDF files."
Why not just use LaTeX? Since PDF is native to Mac, PDFLaTeX seems (to me) to be the best solution. I've been using TeXShop for a few years now and have really enjoyed it. Sure, you don't get the GUI of an Office "suite", but I think the results speak for themselves.