Smaller size does not necessarily imply greater energy efficiency. When Intel debuted Prescott at 90nm, it was infamously toasty.
At the 65nm node and below, gate leakage is a big concern, and it can increase power consumption beyond the savings gained from reducing the operating voltage.
There's everyday tasks like plots and statistics, and then there's specialized tools that are specific to fields and, er, specialties.
For simple plotting and statistics, I'd look into Scientific Python, or Matlab/Octave/Gnuplot.
For programming concepts in general, I advocate taking a course from the CS department, preferably one of the ones that are based on SICP (Berkeley CS61A, MIT 6.001). Then supplement that with some sort of imperative language, and you'll be set for life (cough).
In High Energy Physics, most software has historically been written in FORTRAN. However there is a move toward C++. A few examples:
The main framework for analysis is called ROOT. It's C++ based and very capable. The old FORTRAN-based framework is called PAW.
PYTHIA is the primary simulator for particle physics. Past versions were in FORTRAN, but recently the first C++ version has appeared.
(FORTRAN is kinda fun, in that you have to watch your spaces... and the commonblocks...)
Brookhaven received a donation $13 million so that the 2006 RHIC run could go for 20 weeks, vs 12. (The summary to the contrary, I would say that BNL is a particle physics lab.)
At work, I do stuff that requires a lot of logic, but not necessarily speed. The largest V4/V5 are only slightly larger than the largest S3. The price, though, is like $8000 vs $200! Altera has even bigger ones, but they want $11K each and a minimum order of 3.
So, I say that someone on the project realized that a $10K dev board probably wouldn't sell.:P I do wonder why they chose a XC3S4000 over a 5000, though.
I'm a hardware guy, so I'm not quite sure what you mean by "Linux virtual console semantics". If what you want is a huge, massive terminal (with many virtual ones lurking), then I would say it can probably be done with this board. Text is much easier than 3D.
You must understand, though, that programming in an HDL is not like writing conventional code -- it's about describing hardware. So if you've never done any hardware before, there will be a learning curve.
After that, though, you need to know what to do with it. That's the hard part. Usually you select an FPGA to fit your requirements, and not the other way around.
If you want to play with hardware acceleration, I could see something like a physics coprocessor. Write a pretty app with various objects in it, send the data out to the FPGA for processing, and read back the new coordinates.
I've followed ProjectVGA for awhile, and while it's fairly simple, it's got a major advantage in that it's PCI. It's probably the cheapest PCI/FPGA dev board in existence.
The main caveat is that because it's a 2-layer board, signal integrity might not work out at high operating frequencies. Also, since the idea was to make a VGA-compatible video card, the FPGA chosen doesn't have a lot of logic, compared to to the OGD1. The part is 10 times smaller.
But you could still write something useful that would fit in 400K gates, I reckon. At least I'm planning to look into it. Maybe an open-source sound card.
I got a Thinkpad 570 a few years ago off eBay to serve as my laptop. It comes in 266 and 366 MHz flavors (PII), and supports up to 192 MB RAM. For mobility purposes, the battery life is around two hours (I had the battery refilled). The most important feature of this laptop is the USB port. I run Windows 2000.
~$100 Thinkpad 570, 266 MHz, 192 MB SDRAM ~$80 40 GB HD (this was years ago) ~$15 Floppy drive ~$80 Battery refill
I'm thinking about getting an SSD too, to see what effect it'll have on battery life. When the X200 comes out, though, I may just spring for it and put my 570 aside.
I just started reading Snow Crash today, incidentally. I'm not that far in, but it would make sense that for a virtual world to really take off, it would have to be the only game in town.
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It's pretty application dependent. For most desktop usage, more clocks aren't too useful, but for video encoding, gaming, and such, CPU performance is the limiting factor.
I'm running my E2140 (stock 1.6 GHz) at 2.8 GHz. I'd say it's a worthwhile overclock.
Compare Chua's "Linear and Nonlinear Circuits" to any undergrad circuit theory textbook today. The difference is absolutely ridiculous.
He's also the inventor of "Chua's circuit", a neat little thing that does chaos-theory things.
When I was at Berkeley, Chua was teaching some course about nonlinear networks and neural processing. The description sounded interesting, if a little out there.
If by weather you mean climate, sure. Don't forget protein folding, physical chemistry, lattice QCD, and materials science. "Stockpile stewardship" is definitely there in the list of supercomputer applications, but there's lots of unclassified work that gets done to improve the world.
The low-power RISC market is already pretty saturated. This move by Apple seems pretty strange to me. Perhaps they want access to PA's secret fab partner.
Since you're straight out of high school, they're going to have to teach you what to do. It could take a while, and if the field you end up working in is like mine, all the science is grad-level and there's very little resources on a basic level.
I expect that you'll be assigned a PI and you'll be given a project/sub-project to work on, either by yourself or more likely with another student or grad student. What this project will be is hard to say. It will definitely involve computing in some way, though: simulation, data analysis, design.
Don't be too apprehensive. Most labs are fairly chill, and the people are cool for the most part. There's always a few bad apples, but you've got a long ways before bad PIs can influence your career.
Well, I'm at RHIC, which is at Brookhaven, in New York. Perhaps it has more to do with our schedule. RHIC is in shutdown during the summer, which is when all the BNL open house stuff happens. During the Run, certainly everyone out at the ring has to be authorized.
Depending on the materials, the activation may not be particularly long-lived. At RHIC, the STAR detector comes out of the hall during cooldown for maintenance. I imagine the detectors at the LHC will need to be serviced at some point as well, or upgraded.
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Smaller size does not necessarily imply greater energy efficiency. When Intel debuted Prescott at 90nm, it was infamously toasty.
At the 65nm node and below, gate leakage is a big concern, and it can increase power consumption beyond the savings gained from reducing the operating voltage.
;) I'm more on the engineering end of things, so I don't fire up ROOT so much. Maybe you should stick to PAW, like some people I know?
There's everyday tasks like plots and statistics, and then there's specialized tools that are specific to fields and, er, specialties.
For simple plotting and statistics, I'd look into Scientific Python, or Matlab/Octave/Gnuplot.
For programming concepts in general, I advocate taking a course from the CS department, preferably one of the ones that are based on SICP (Berkeley CS61A, MIT 6.001). Then supplement that with some sort of imperative language, and you'll be set for life (cough).
In High Energy Physics, most software has historically been written in FORTRAN. However there is a move toward C++. A few examples:
The main framework for analysis is called ROOT. It's C++ based and very capable. The old FORTRAN-based framework is called PAW.
PYTHIA is the primary simulator for particle physics. Past versions were in FORTRAN, but recently the first C++ version has appeared.
(FORTRAN is kinda fun, in that you have to watch your spaces... and the commonblocks...)
Brookhaven received a donation $13 million so that the 2006 RHIC run could go for 20 weeks, vs 12. (The summary to the contrary, I would say that BNL is a particle physics lab.)
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/PR_display.asp?prID=06-X2
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=328
This year though, the budget process is such that there may not be a RHIC run at all!
It was bloody hot last weekend but now it's freezing again.
At work, I do stuff that requires a lot of logic, but not necessarily speed. The largest V4/V5 are only slightly larger than the largest S3. The price, though, is like $8000 vs $200! Altera has even bigger ones, but they want $11K each and a minimum order of 3.
:P I do wonder why they chose a XC3S4000 over a 5000, though.
So, I say that someone on the project realized that a $10K dev board probably wouldn't sell.
I'm a hardware guy, so I'm not quite sure what you mean by "Linux virtual console semantics". If what you want is a huge, massive terminal (with many virtual ones lurking), then I would say it can probably be done with this board. Text is much easier than 3D.
You must understand, though, that programming in an HDL is not like writing conventional code -- it's about describing hardware. So if you've never done any hardware before, there will be a learning curve.
Get a Spartan-3 dev kit for $200 or less.
After that, though, you need to know what to do with it. That's the hard part. Usually you select an FPGA to fit your requirements, and not the other way around.
If you want to play with hardware acceleration, I could see something like a physics coprocessor. Write a pretty app with various objects in it, send the data out to the FPGA for processing, and read back the new coordinates.
You can do pretty much anything with an FPGA.
I've followed ProjectVGA for awhile, and while it's fairly simple, it's got a major advantage in that it's PCI. It's probably the cheapest PCI/FPGA dev board in existence.
The main caveat is that because it's a 2-layer board, signal integrity might not work out at high operating frequencies. Also, since the idea was to make a VGA-compatible video card, the FPGA chosen doesn't have a lot of logic, compared to to the OGD1. The part is 10 times smaller.
But you could still write something useful that would fit in 400K gates, I reckon. At least I'm planning to look into it. Maybe an open-source sound card.
Hey, I liked Microsoft Bob. Granted, I was 9 or so, but you'd think that would be the intended audience.
I got a Thinkpad 570 a few years ago off eBay to serve as my laptop. It comes in 266 and 366 MHz flavors (PII), and supports up to 192 MB RAM. For mobility purposes, the battery life is around two hours (I had the battery refilled). The most important feature of this laptop is the USB port. I run Windows 2000.
~$100 Thinkpad 570, 266 MHz, 192 MB SDRAM
~$80 40 GB HD (this was years ago)
~$15 Floppy drive
~$80 Battery refill
I'm thinking about getting an SSD too, to see what effect it'll have on battery life. When the X200 comes out, though, I may just spring for it and put my 570 aside.
I just started reading Snow Crash today, incidentally. I'm not that far in, but it would make sense that for a virtual world to really take off, it would have to be the only game in town.
s/SRAM/DRAM/
It's pretty application dependent. For most desktop usage, more clocks aren't too useful, but for video encoding, gaming, and such, CPU performance is the limiting factor.
I'm running my E2140 (stock 1.6 GHz) at 2.8 GHz. I'd say it's a worthwhile overclock.
Well, copper's expensive these days.
Compare Chua's "Linear and Nonlinear Circuits" to any undergrad circuit theory textbook today. The difference is absolutely ridiculous.
He's also the inventor of "Chua's circuit", a neat little thing that does chaos-theory things.
When I was at Berkeley, Chua was teaching some course about nonlinear networks and neural processing. The description sounded interesting, if a little out there.
Heh, C#. What's the hardware platform? I know nothing about engine controls -- what sort of update frequency do you run at?
If by weather you mean climate, sure. Don't forget protein folding, physical chemistry, lattice QCD, and materials science. "Stockpile stewardship" is definitely there in the list of supercomputer applications, but there's lots of unclassified work that gets done to improve the world.
The low-power RISC market is already pretty saturated. This move by Apple seems pretty strange to me. Perhaps they want access to PA's secret fab partner.
Since you're straight out of high school, they're going to have to teach you what to do. It could take a while, and if the field you end up working in is like mine, all the science is grad-level and there's very little resources on a basic level.
I expect that you'll be assigned a PI and you'll be given a project/sub-project to work on, either by yourself or more likely with another student or grad student. What this project will be is hard to say. It will definitely involve computing in some way, though: simulation, data analysis, design.
Don't be too apprehensive. Most labs are fairly chill, and the people are cool for the most part. There's always a few bad apples, but you've got a long ways before bad PIs can influence your career.
I like it, but they need to make the spacing more compact.
Well, I'm at RHIC, which is at Brookhaven, in New York. Perhaps it has more to do with our schedule. RHIC is in shutdown during the summer, which is when all the BNL open house stuff happens. During the Run, certainly everyone out at the ring has to be authorized.
Depending on the materials, the activation may not be particularly long-lived. At RHIC, the STAR detector comes out of the hall during cooldown for maintenance. I imagine the detectors at the LHC will need to be serviced at some point as well, or upgraded.
Veni, vidi, roflmao.
I lost my graphing calculator freshman year. Didn't miss it at all. A solar-powered scientific calculator is what I used through all my EE classes.