Sunday, August 30, 2009
SGI + LinuxDNA = Supercomputer
I am glad to announce that we are now officially sponsored by SGI! We will be working on engineering a supercomputer ICC kernel for the ALtix 4700 IPF architecture. This is not to be confused with a "cluster" in that this system utilized NUMA and therefore has one kernel and one system image for anywhere from 128 to 1024 cpus using SLES 11 for the OS. RHEL is also supported. ICC patches for earlier kernel versions show great potential and we can not wait to see how well our kernel scales.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
The present state of golf instruction
This blog post was inspired by two instructional articles... one in the ever popular Golf Digest and the other in Golf Magazine. Both articles were published about the same time and both address the exact same part of the swing - impact.
First, in Golf Digest, Vol 58, No 11, page 167 Bobby Clampett talks about how at impact the club should be still travelling down - even with the driver.
Second, Golf Magazine Jan 2008, page 89 top 100 teacher Charlie King gives "empirical" data on how if the club is moving up at impact (the driver) the golfer will gain a measurable increase in distance no matter if the speed of the club is low (75mph) or high (120mph).
I've got to say guys "Stop the violence!". Really... you're taking a way too complicated game and making it impossible. Shouldn't we just be happy we hit the ball? Bobby... you make mention of "The Golfing Machine" book as your cite for technical correctness... yes, the book you read backwards skipping chapters and then randomly back to other chapters. Tell me, are you as crazy as the book? Next, Charlie... what is wrong with impact at the bottom? Is it really worth it to encourage a chilly dip for a measly 5 or so extra yards?
So here is the conclusion for all golfers in my own special laboratory tests:
1.) Try to hit the ball
2.) Try to hit it in the middle of the club face
3.) Try to hit the ball down the middle of the fairway
Follow these highly technical tips and watch your score get better and better! (And you didn't even have to have a magazine subscription for this one)
First, in Golf Digest, Vol 58, No 11, page 167 Bobby Clampett talks about how at impact the club should be still travelling down - even with the driver.
Second, Golf Magazine Jan 2008, page 89 top 100 teacher Charlie King gives "empirical" data on how if the club is moving up at impact (the driver) the golfer will gain a measurable increase in distance no matter if the speed of the club is low (75mph) or high (120mph).
I've got to say guys "Stop the violence!". Really... you're taking a way too complicated game and making it impossible. Shouldn't we just be happy we hit the ball? Bobby... you make mention of "The Golfing Machine" book as your cite for technical correctness... yes, the book you read backwards skipping chapters and then randomly back to other chapters. Tell me, are you as crazy as the book? Next, Charlie... what is wrong with impact at the bottom? Is it really worth it to encourage a chilly dip for a measly 5 or so extra yards?
So here is the conclusion for all golfers in my own special laboratory tests:
1.) Try to hit the ball
2.) Try to hit it in the middle of the club face
3.) Try to hit the ball down the middle of the fairway
Follow these highly technical tips and watch your score get better and better! (And you didn't even have to have a magazine subscription for this one)
Monday, November 24, 2008
Monday, November 17, 2008
Getting Green with Linux
Being that Linux is free it is already relatively more green than other OS choices, but there are many things you can do to make Linux more economical than it may be from a default install:
1.) Spindown - Spindown is a daemon that can be configured to watch over all of the drives that you may have running on your system. Since I like to do video editing I have several disk arrays attached to my main workstation - without spindown they would stay up, wasting power and money, but since spindown can handle each drive (or drive array) separately, I can choose when I want to spin down a drive *individually* - based on demand. To my knowledge this can not be done in Windows... if you spin down one disk, all the other disks in the system must come down also. You can check out spindown at: http://code.google.com/p/spindown/
2.) OnDemand cpu scheduling - If you are using kernel 2.6.21 or higher you should be able to enable or compile in OnDemand scheduling for your cpus. Without OnDemand scheduling your cpus behave "normally" - running at their top clock speed no matter if the system is completely idle or not. This is a big waste of energy since there is no reason for the system to be running that way. You can check out detailed information on what is waking your system up the most with Intel's PowerTop application (once you have OnDemand scheduling enabled) http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/
3.) Power off your monitor(s) - The biggest chunk of energy wasted comes from what your monitors eat up. Schedule your monitors to go asleep when you're not around. In KDE 3.5 you can do this by going to the Control Panel > Peripherals > Display > Power Control > Power Off After
These three things are the biggest energy eaters in your systems. After following these tips you should be saving around 50% of your normal power consumption for systems that you never power off... but you do power off your systems, right?
1.) Spindown - Spindown is a daemon that can be configured to watch over all of the drives that you may have running on your system. Since I like to do video editing I have several disk arrays attached to my main workstation - without spindown they would stay up, wasting power and money, but since spindown can handle each drive (or drive array) separately, I can choose when I want to spin down a drive *individually* - based on demand. To my knowledge this can not be done in Windows... if you spin down one disk, all the other disks in the system must come down also. You can check out spindown at: http://code.google.com/p/spindown/
2.) OnDemand cpu scheduling - If you are using kernel 2.6.21 or higher you should be able to enable or compile in OnDemand scheduling for your cpus. Without OnDemand scheduling your cpus behave "normally" - running at their top clock speed no matter if the system is completely idle or not. This is a big waste of energy since there is no reason for the system to be running that way. You can check out detailed information on what is waking your system up the most with Intel's PowerTop application (once you have OnDemand scheduling enabled) http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/
3.) Power off your monitor(s) - The biggest chunk of energy wasted comes from what your monitors eat up. Schedule your monitors to go asleep when you're not around. In KDE 3.5 you can do this by going to the Control Panel > Peripherals > Display > Power Control > Power Off After
These three things are the biggest energy eaters in your systems. After following these tips you should be saving around 50% of your normal power consumption for systems that you never power off... but you do power off your systems, right?
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Desktop Linux has Become Palatable!
Could it finally be that I can have my cake and eat it too? The more I spend time customizing my Gentoo installation for the desktop the more time I wonder to myself why I'm running Vista or OS X. Up until now, the payoff with Linux for me has always been on the server side of things. When economic times are tough like they are right now, Linux often gets the OK where the Windows Server Family and proprietary UNIX doesn't. The ability to really get in the the kernel and code where you'd get arrested for even trying with Windows means that I can take the time to really understand what is going on under the hood of the OS... and thus gain a skill level that does not exist with Windows. This ability to hack around has made it's way to the desktop for me... right now in the form of KDE 3.5.9 stable. No GNOME... even though everybody on the planet seems to be using Ubuntu 8.10. I'm not saying it's not a good way to go, I just like way KDE give the ability to highly customize the gui. Being that I have always been interested in design KDE once again lets me get my hands dirty so that I can put together something that is not only functional but pleasing to the eyes. That's important when you get glued to a computer for the amount of time I have been lately. So all in all I'm seeing some very significant gains for Linux on the desktop right now no matter what distro you choose... So much so I'm almost ready to give up the ghost on Vista and OS X completely. Seriously Microsoft... I spend ridiculous amounts of money on your products year after year. What's there to keep me? Your system is always getting infected since everybody is stuck using it. It's like it's got a big target painted on it... and guess what? It's out of control. The amount of patches that constantly go out combined with the heap of security applications that you have to run are retarding the system. Not to say you should not practice good security or have those kinds of applications at your disposal... it's just that a single switch over to Linux and you don't really have to worry as much... which cuts down on the end user's paranoia. Plus the fact that there are perfectly compatible applications that are free to use on Linux. Take OpenOffice for example... You keep switching up your Office user interfaces so we have to relearn the simplest of tasks each release... why not take that opportunity to switch to a completely free alternative that stays the same each release? The same can be said for Vista. You keep changing stuff up that people have got used to. No wonder everybody went back to XP... they were used to it!
So with all that said I still must remain fair. Linux still has a long way to go yet. Things like X11 are still cumbersome. Perhaps the Redhat project Wayland will fix that. It needs to be ironed out quickly though. I would love see things like X forwarding being a simple compile option. Seriously... who even uses that anymore? You could add security and sweep out unused features all in one blow! This is one area where Windows has it right. That is what made them great on the desktop... the ease of reconfigurability with multiple monitors and for gaming. Right now I run dual monitors on my Gentoo system but when I want to play something like Doom 3 it ends up running on a small square on my secondary monitor... if I want to actually see the game I have to use nVidia's settings tool to reconfigure X for a single monitor. Not good! Also windows need to remember where they last were located... a small issue but annoying none the less.
So that's it fokes. Increased security plus a palatable, functional, free desktop with 3D effects. hmmm... you want to keep me around M$ it's time to show me the money! As one of your employees once put it to me, "Know thy enemy!" Bad economies could take you the way of Irix and not a fine wine. Believe that.
So with all that said I still must remain fair. Linux still has a long way to go yet. Things like X11 are still cumbersome. Perhaps the Redhat project Wayland will fix that. It needs to be ironed out quickly though. I would love see things like X forwarding being a simple compile option. Seriously... who even uses that anymore? You could add security and sweep out unused features all in one blow! This is one area where Windows has it right. That is what made them great on the desktop... the ease of reconfigurability with multiple monitors and for gaming. Right now I run dual monitors on my Gentoo system but when I want to play something like Doom 3 it ends up running on a small square on my secondary monitor... if I want to actually see the game I have to use nVidia's settings tool to reconfigure X for a single monitor. Not good! Also windows need to remember where they last were located... a small issue but annoying none the less.
So that's it fokes. Increased security plus a palatable, functional, free desktop with 3D effects. hmmm... you want to keep me around M$ it's time to show me the money! As one of your employees once put it to me, "Know thy enemy!" Bad economies could take you the way of Irix and not a fine wine. Believe that.
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