Well there are nine million posts on this so no doubt I'll get buried. But that is quite ok.
I have tried off and on since 2000 [sic] to get Linux going. We actually first ran RedHat in the lab in 2000 thanks to someone - an undergrad - a lot smarter than me. Since then we've put up a cluster under RedHat and currently under CentOs. Again thanks to some brilliant undergrads.
My own experience has not been that great until lately. About the only thing I could get going was Xandros. It actually worked pretty well. But Ubuntu is the cat's meow. At 7.10 they finally have it, and I am pretty sure that Hardy will do the trick. I have 7.10 running on three pieces of hardware, two of them flawlessly. The laggard is a Dell laptop that has problems, but is still quite useful.
Congrats to Ubuntu. May then live long and prosper. May they make old hardware new again. May they save school system gazillions of dollars.
One happy old chemist.
I've got it and it is a great book. Anyone who knows Sobell's work would tell you that his stuff is of keeper quality. I think I first ran into one of his Unix books around 1990.
Why would you want a book for Ubuntu? If you are a little more into it than the casual user, it will make your life a lot easier in terms of networking, etc., etc. Of course you MIGHT find the info on the web but this will save you a lot of time. If your time is worth $25/hr and this saves you a couple of hours, it's worth it.
Someone mentioned that Hardy might be in business longer than 7.1 about which this book is written. If that is true you might want to wait for a version that goes with Hardy, but I doubt that much at the fundamental level will change.
Recommended if you are a member of the target audience.
Hmm...
NaCl dissolves in water. Despite your claim that ionic bonds are stronger than
covalent bonds.
Wouldn't this lead to a few problem with, ah, er, rubber?
Reaction of a very old chemist, who barely remembers what rubber is good for...
Ah...
Please read the article and make up your own mind.
The author refers to her work of many years and that
of others. Looks credible to me. As a teacher for about forty years, I happen to think that the article is bang on.
Scientific American is not credible? It certainly isn't the National Enquirer. And yes, they do take advertisements as do the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and your local paper. If it weren't for these advertisements most publications would be out of business. Please use a little judgment.
Ciao,
Bonzo
"Throughout the film, Ingemar tells himself over and over that it could have been worse, reciting several examples, such as a man who took a shortcut onto the field during a track meet and was killed by a javelin and the story of the dog Laika several times, the first creature sent into orbit by the Russians (without any way to get her back down)."
(from Wikipedia)
An excellent movie - My Life As A Dog - won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1987.
It was directed by Lasse Halstrom who went on to fame and fortune directing such movies as:
# 1999 - The Cider House Rules
# 2000 - Chocolat
# 2001 - The Shipping News
# 2005 - An Unfinished Life
# 2005 - Casanova.
My Life as a Dog is a wonderful movie, still worth watching if you've not seen it.
Ciao, Bonzo with fond memories of Sputnik, Laika, and geek glory days.
Nice to hear that people still find slide-rules useful in certain applications nowadays.
However...
A slide rule is good (or better WAS good) for introductory chemistry and physics classes because it forced you to keep track of the exponents for the calculation. That way you didn't (usually) get the ridiculous answers that people sometimes report who are addicted to calculators.
But a modern calculator is a God-send for complicated problems that involve lengthy calculations. These are very easy to mess up with a slide rule. With a calculator you can usually do the calculation, twice, much faster than you could with a slide-rule. Generally if your two calcs agree you probably haven't screwed up anything.
So far no one seems to have mentioned "circular" slide rules that had certain advantages in that the answer never ran off the end...
OC
Please clarify: have you got one or two Q6600 in your setup? If two, how exactly (hardware) are you doing this? I think you are probably right about the green metric, but I really don't know enough about the AMD side of things to say... Thanks for comment.
Maybe it is buried below the level that I read, but I am surprised someone did not point out the available intel quad core chips for less than $300 as another basis for a microwulf. I'm glad these folks did this, but I have some pretty serious reservations about hauling around a no case Frankenstein like this to the schools. This is dangerous. MIGHT be ok at the College but again if someone sticks their pinkies in for a look-see...
So I'd suggest thinking about suitable cases for dual quad core setup. My guess is that newegging could lead to a system that would be even cheaper and perhaps have better performance. Some information about what flavor of 'wulf was being used would also have been interesting.
Of course very shortly Octa Core will be available and if the memory interconnect is done better than in the current intel quad core these things will then be the sweet spot. With respect to interconnect GigE is fine for a lot of important problems. If you want cheap then in most cases the highspeed interconnect system is going to cost more than the computer.
Just some random thoughts. Nice article.
Thanks for your comments.
You make a good point that scaling alone is not enough, if the code being scaled is inefficient.
So you are probably aware that a good thing to check is how many "seconds" of some standard simulation can be done
per computing unit.
Although Gromacs is supposed to be the fastest gun in the West - and it is on a single processor, it doesn't scale vary well. At least in my experience.
This may be due to the kind of machines I have access to. You may want to look at the Gromacs
web site where some examples of scaling are listed:
http://www.gromacs.org/content/view/26/39/
For "large" jobs, it is probably best to do some tests to decide which program to use. There are, of
course, other reasons one might prefer NAMD (Schulten's system) to Gromacs such as its integration
with VMD (the Illinois group's graphics program) or the possibility of interacting with a simulation
"on the fly" using a haptic device...
Ciao,
OC
You make a good point.
It is now possible to buy a quad core from Dell for about $750 (or less)
to play around with.
However, as mentioned earlier in this discussion, the work of Klaus Schulten at Illinois is quite instructive. His program NAMD (not another molecular dynamics program) has been designed from the ground up to scale well on many processors. This program does a lot better in this respect than most other md programs out there, although this will no doubt change.
So don't despair about this being a second rank research tool. There are some folks poised to take good advantage of it.
I do strongly agree with your point that fundamental advances can still be made on small systems.
Speaking of flying eggs...
Actually, this reminds me of Uncle Shelby's ABZs
(A wickedly funny pseudo children's book for adults.)
Something like:
E is for Egg. E is also for Ernie, a giant who lives in the ceiling.
Ernie loves eggs. Go to the refrigerator and get a nice fresh egg.
Toss it high in the air, to the ceiling, and yell "Catch, Ernie, Catch.."
(Sorry, I couldn't help myself.)
I think you've nailed it here. To collaborate with my students we typically do things in word. I highlight problems in yellow and add my suggestions highlighted in magenta. I know there are more "sophisticated" ways to do this, but it works for us...
As for submission, as most have pointed out it is a matter of discipline. The small number of equations and problems with them is not usually a difficulty for biologists and (non-theoretical) chemists. Mathematicians and (some) engineers find Tex/Latex much easier to use than Word/equation editor.
By the way, I LOVE Lyx/Latex and use it when I can. All of the touted advantages including excellent control of typography are there. It is just problematic when exchanging revised versions of stuff with students.
As an amateur blogger, sometimes on scientific topics...
I usually like to give a web reference when I quote from some article or post.
Unfortunately, if you are quoting from a scientific journal or article where the material is not available without a subscription, this is not going to do anyone any good.
So I usually quote the stuff and put in the caveat that the post is done in the belief that it is allowed by the doctrine of fair use. I've cautiously put in some graphics in an attempt to test the waters.
So far, no one has called me on it. I don't know what I'd do if they did. (Probably cave..)
But as others have commented there always seems to be some jerk out there who thinks that they can make a lot of money out of some fairly trivial and shortlived post on a blog. Makes you wonder.
OC
One hardly knows where to begin.
The Brits deserve a lot of credit for their "sealing wax and string" approach to science. Read Crick (and Watson), Max Perutz, Rosalind Franklin, etc. (Fred Sanger and many others for the
'real' afficianados out there.)
Some of the comments on slashdot seem to imply that academic researchers are a bunch of lazy sobs who are only interested in feathering their nests... Couldn't be further from the truth.
"It's the people, stupid" to paraphrase a lot of stuff out there.
What is amusing to someone who's been on both sides of the table (academics and industry) is that when you push the people who complain about the training in the Universities concerning what they want, they usually do not have any constructive suggestions. "Send us smart people who are well trained" is usually what you hear. And we are actually pretty good at this on the university side.
So it is sad to hear about what is happening to funding in the UK. They are very good at doing tremendous work on a shoestring, as are the people in the US. Good luck getting the same quantity and quality work done from "contract research."
Mr. B.
Having taught at what passes for very good undergraduate liberal arts
colleges and a major research university, all I can say is the above.
You can get a lot of course material on the MIT web site for free. The
same for many, many, other colleges and universities.
If this turkey really needs $2.50 for his efforts, maybe he should start
working for one of the "commercial" universities...
Slashdot Mirror
Well there are nine million posts on this so no doubt I'll get buried. But that is quite ok. I have tried off and on since 2000 [sic] to get Linux going. We actually first ran RedHat in the lab in 2000 thanks to someone - an undergrad - a lot smarter than me. Since then we've put up a cluster under RedHat and currently under CentOs. Again thanks to some brilliant undergrads. My own experience has not been that great until lately. About the only thing I could get going was Xandros. It actually worked pretty well. But Ubuntu is the cat's meow. At 7.10 they finally have it, and I am pretty sure that Hardy will do the trick. I have 7.10 running on three pieces of hardware, two of them flawlessly. The laggard is a Dell laptop that has problems, but is still quite useful. Congrats to Ubuntu. May then live long and prosper. May they make old hardware new again. May they save school system gazillions of dollars. One happy old chemist.
I've got it and it is a great book. Anyone who knows Sobell's work would tell you that his stuff is of keeper quality. I think I first ran into one of his Unix books around 1990. Why would you want a book for Ubuntu? If you are a little more into it than the casual user, it will make your life a lot easier in terms of networking, etc., etc. Of course you MIGHT find the info on the web but this will save you a lot of time. If your time is worth $25/hr and this saves you a couple of hours, it's worth it. Someone mentioned that Hardy might be in business longer than 7.1 about which this book is written. If that is true you might want to wait for a version that goes with Hardy, but I doubt that much at the fundamental level will change. Recommended if you are a member of the target audience.
Hmm... NaCl dissolves in water. Despite your claim that ionic bonds are stronger than covalent bonds. Wouldn't this lead to a few problem with, ah, er, rubber? Reaction of a very old chemist, who barely remembers what rubber is good for...
Ah... Please read the article and make up your own mind. The author refers to her work of many years and that of others. Looks credible to me. As a teacher for about forty years, I happen to think that the article is bang on. Scientific American is not credible? It certainly isn't the National Enquirer. And yes, they do take advertisements as do the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and your local paper. If it weren't for these advertisements most publications would be out of business. Please use a little judgment. Ciao, Bonzo
"Throughout the film, Ingemar tells himself over and over that it could have been worse, reciting several examples, such as a man who took a shortcut onto the field during a track meet and was killed by a javelin and the story of the dog Laika several times, the first creature sent into orbit by the Russians (without any way to get her back down)." (from Wikipedia) An excellent movie - My Life As A Dog - won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1987. It was directed by Lasse Halstrom who went on to fame and fortune directing such movies as: # 1999 - The Cider House Rules # 2000 - Chocolat # 2001 - The Shipping News # 2005 - An Unfinished Life # 2005 - Casanova. My Life as a Dog is a wonderful movie, still worth watching if you've not seen it. Ciao, Bonzo with fond memories of Sputnik, Laika, and geek glory days.
Nice to hear that people still find slide-rules useful in certain applications nowadays. However... A slide rule is good (or better WAS good) for introductory chemistry and physics classes because it forced you to keep track of the exponents for the calculation. That way you didn't (usually) get the ridiculous answers that people sometimes report who are addicted to calculators. But a modern calculator is a God-send for complicated problems that involve lengthy calculations. These are very easy to mess up with a slide rule. With a calculator you can usually do the calculation, twice, much faster than you could with a slide-rule. Generally if your two calcs agree you probably haven't screwed up anything. So far no one seems to have mentioned "circular" slide rules that had certain advantages in that the answer never ran off the end... OC
Ha, ha, ha... $CAN now worth more than $US.
First the bomb-girl with the board and playdough. Now this. I shudder to think what the Caltechies may do with this information for their next prank.
Agreed. Thanks for your thoughts on this. Either the octa core will be a better choice or its arrival will make the quads even cheaper.
Please clarify: have you got one or two Q6600 in your setup? If two, how exactly (hardware) are you doing this? I think you are probably right about the green metric, but I really don't know enough about the AMD side of things to say... Thanks for comment.
Maybe it is buried below the level that I read, but I am surprised someone did not point out the available intel quad core chips for less than $300 as another basis for a microwulf. I'm glad these folks did this, but I have some pretty serious reservations about hauling around a no case Frankenstein like this to the schools. This is dangerous. MIGHT be ok at the College but again if someone sticks their pinkies in for a look-see... So I'd suggest thinking about suitable cases for dual quad core setup. My guess is that newegging could lead to a system that would be even cheaper and perhaps have better performance. Some information about what flavor of 'wulf was being used would also have been interesting. Of course very shortly Octa Core will be available and if the memory interconnect is done better than in the current intel quad core these things will then be the sweet spot. With respect to interconnect GigE is fine for a lot of important problems. If you want cheap then in most cases the highspeed interconnect system is going to cost more than the computer. Just some random thoughts. Nice article.
Yes, this is the strip. It is published today in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, to their credit.
You forgot adult diapers...
Thanks for your comments. You make a good point that scaling alone is not enough, if the code being scaled is inefficient. So you are probably aware that a good thing to check is how many "seconds" of some standard simulation can be done per computing unit. Although Gromacs is supposed to be the fastest gun in the West - and it is on a single processor, it doesn't scale vary well. At least in my experience. This may be due to the kind of machines I have access to. You may want to look at the Gromacs web site where some examples of scaling are listed: http://www.gromacs.org/content/view/26/39/ For "large" jobs, it is probably best to do some tests to decide which program to use. There are, of course, other reasons one might prefer NAMD (Schulten's system) to Gromacs such as its integration with VMD (the Illinois group's graphics program) or the possibility of interacting with a simulation "on the fly" using a haptic device... Ciao, OC
You make a good point. It is now possible to buy a quad core from Dell for about $750 (or less) to play around with. However, as mentioned earlier in this discussion, the work of Klaus Schulten at Illinois is quite instructive. His program NAMD (not another molecular dynamics program) has been designed from the ground up to scale well on many processors. This program does a lot better in this respect than most other md programs out there, although this will no doubt change. So don't despair about this being a second rank research tool. There are some folks poised to take good advantage of it. I do strongly agree with your point that fundamental advances can still be made on small systems.
Speaking of flying eggs... Actually, this reminds me of Uncle Shelby's ABZs (A wickedly funny pseudo children's book for adults.) Something like: E is for Egg. E is also for Ernie, a giant who lives in the ceiling. Ernie loves eggs. Go to the refrigerator and get a nice fresh egg. Toss it high in the air, to the ceiling, and yell "Catch, Ernie, Catch.." (Sorry, I couldn't help myself.)
Don't you mean "hurting"? Couldn't you please fix this?
I think you've nailed it here. To collaborate with my students we typically do things in word. I highlight problems in yellow and add my suggestions highlighted in magenta. I know there are more "sophisticated" ways to do this, but it works for us... As for submission, as most have pointed out it is a matter of discipline. The small number of equations and problems with them is not usually a difficulty for biologists and (non-theoretical) chemists. Mathematicians and (some) engineers find Tex/Latex much easier to use than Word/equation editor. By the way, I LOVE Lyx/Latex and use it when I can. All of the touted advantages including excellent control of typography are there. It is just problematic when exchanging revised versions of stuff with students.
As an amateur blogger, sometimes on scientific topics... I usually like to give a web reference when I quote from some article or post. Unfortunately, if you are quoting from a scientific journal or article where the material is not available without a subscription, this is not going to do anyone any good. So I usually quote the stuff and put in the caveat that the post is done in the belief that it is allowed by the doctrine of fair use. I've cautiously put in some graphics in an attempt to test the waters. So far, no one has called me on it. I don't know what I'd do if they did. (Probably cave..) But as others have commented there always seems to be some jerk out there who thinks that they can make a lot of money out of some fairly trivial and shortlived post on a blog. Makes you wonder. OC
No, they were just normal aliens who used Windows... (Couldn't resist)
Actually I think it has been pretty well established that the pyramids were built by space aliens....
One hardly knows where to begin. The Brits deserve a lot of credit for their "sealing wax and string" approach to science. Read Crick (and Watson), Max Perutz, Rosalind Franklin, etc. (Fred Sanger and many others for the 'real' afficianados out there.) Some of the comments on slashdot seem to imply that academic researchers are a bunch of lazy sobs who are only interested in feathering their nests... Couldn't be further from the truth. "It's the people, stupid" to paraphrase a lot of stuff out there. What is amusing to someone who's been on both sides of the table (academics and industry) is that when you push the people who complain about the training in the Universities concerning what they want, they usually do not have any constructive suggestions. "Send us smart people who are well trained" is usually what you hear. And we are actually pretty good at this on the university side. So it is sad to hear about what is happening to funding in the UK. They are very good at doing tremendous work on a shoestring, as are the people in the US. Good luck getting the same quantity and quality work done from "contract research." Mr. B.
I share your amazement. I thought E = hv or E = mc2 So powered by light means no energy required? Gaggg...
Just as Bush/Cheney "don't torture" ?
Having taught at what passes for very good undergraduate liberal arts colleges and a major research university, all I can say is the above. You can get a lot of course material on the MIT web site for free. The same for many, many, other colleges and universities. If this turkey really needs $2.50 for his efforts, maybe he should start working for one of the "commercial" universities...