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Handhelds

Hand-Powered Hardware? 298

Posted by timothy from the for-the-coming-apocalypse dept.
quiddity writes "Following the Goofy USB Devices post, one has to know what can be self-powered when the batteries all die. You can handcrank your Gameboy, recharge your cellphone or pda (even grandpa), wind up a webserver (with minions, a beowulf..), see in the dark, and project a movie. What else can we propel through the next blackout/apocalypse?" Some of these devices have have been on Slashdot before; what cool hand-powered tech hasn't been and should be?
Hardware

Mini-ITX Clustering 348

Posted by michael from the there's-no-i-in-team dept.
NormalVisual writes "Add this cluster to the list of fun stuff you can do with those tiny little Mini-ITX motherboards. I especially like the bit about the peak 200W power dissipation. Look Ma, no fans!! You may now begin with the obligatory Beowulf comments...."
Puzzle Games (Games)

Chess - 2070 CPUs vs 1 GM 248

Posted by timothy from the hitting-all-the-bases dept.
jvarsoke writes "ChessBrain.net broke the world's record for 'largest number of distributed computers used to play a single game' by holding a chess match between Danish GM Peter Heine Nielsen and the equivalent of SETI@home (which similarly, has some people looking for a Mate). 2070 CPU's from 56 countries aided Black by running the chess program Beowulf, including a couple of University clusters. Their supernode ran Linux, and MySQL. The game was relayed by FICS. Results can be viewed here(1) and here(2)."
Books

Neil Gaiman Responds 230

Posted by Roblimo from the nights-are-endless-for-the-sandman's-gods dept.
He says, "Sorry about how long this took to do. Blame it on a European Tour that took much more of my time than I have ever imagined..." No problem, Neil. We love you, and your answers to our questions were certainly worth the wait.
Science

Weather Radar Goes Miniature 167

Posted by michael from the button-up-your-overcoat dept.
quackking writes "As reported today in the Boston Globe, the NSF has committed at least $17M to build out a new network of miniature (at least in comparison with today's monsters) weather radars. This is to radar what Beowulf clusters are to the mainframe; the scientists at U Mass Amherst project that eventually a weather radar node will be deployable for under $20K! Now to figure out how to get real-time access to this mesh of sensors and create a really cool screensaver..."
AMD

Supercomputer Breaks the $100/GFLOPS Barrier 281

Posted by CowboyNeal from the new-kid-in-town dept.
Hank Dietz writes "At the University of Kentucky, KASY0, a Linux cluster of 128+4 AMD Athlon XP 2600+ nodes, achieved 471 GFLOPS on 32-bit HPL. At a cost of less than $39,500, that makes it the first supercomputer to break $100/GFLOPS. It also is the new record holder for POV-Ray 3.5 render speed. The reason this 'Beowulf' is so cost-effective is a new network architecture that achieves high performance using standard hardware: the asymmetric Sparse Flat Neighborhood Network (SFNN)." Because this was a university project, KASY0 was assembled entirely by unversity students, which while being a source of cheap labor, is also a good way to get a lot of students of involved in a great project.
The Courts

SCO Prepares To Sue Linux End Users 1209

Posted by timothy from the bullying-tactics-101 dept.
Bootsy Collins writes "In a brief article, Computer Business Review Online quotes Darl McBride as saying that SCO has been busily identifying Linux end users and is preparing to launch lawsuits against them in order to encourage more such end users to buy licenses from SCO. SCO indicates that they'll start with a company that uses AIX, Dynix and Linux, so as to 'settle several legal arguments in one go.'" Not everyone is going to take the SCO approach sitting down; read on for a story on how (among others) Weta Digital and Australia's Massey University aren't jumping to say Uncle to SCO. Update: 08/20 13:11 GMT by T : Oops! Massey University is in New Zealand, not Australia.
Unix

Open Source Distributed Shell Tools? 31

Posted by Cliff from the for-those-of-you-with-many-boxen dept.
ColonelForbin74 asks: "While some may assume that most larger server clusters run advanced / custom software(i.e. Beowulf, cfengine, OSCAR), many of those stuck in the not-research-this-site-runs-production world know this simply isn't the case. Many people like myself are working with medium-to-large scale clusters with little help other than shell for() loops and some SSH trusted keys. What application-level tools are out there that might help SysAdmin / AppSupport types like myself run commands across a given cluster, push files out, etc? In my desperation to have some sort of tool in my toolbox, I've actually created one. However, I have a hard time believing this is the best thing out there, and would appreciate all the ideas and links I can get!"
Technology

Supercomputing: Raw Power vs. Massive Storage 346

Posted by Hemos from the changing-the-playing-field dept.
securitas writes "The NY Times reports that a pair of Microsoft researchers are challenging the federal policy on funding supercomputers. Gordon Bell and Jim Gray argue that the money would be better spent on massive storage instead of ultra-fast computers because they believe today's supercomputing centers will be tomorrow's superdata centers. They advocate building cheap Linux-based Beowulf clusters (PCs in parallel) instead of supercomputers." NYTimes free reg blah blah.
Media

NYT On Google's Role In Internet Advertising 276

Posted by timothy from the as-yet-no-popups dept.
prostoalex writes "John Markoff and G. Pascal Zachary from The New York Times take a look at Google, its already dominant position in the field of Web search and its increasing influence in the field of Internet advertising. Google is driving advertisers away from larger advertising venues, like AOL-TW et al., since (surprise!) people actually pay attention to relevant text links and are quite annoyed by pop-ups and similar "innovations". Some interesting data about Google: number of employees is about 800, number of buildings is 4, number of servers is 54K, for which there are about 100K microprocessors and 261K hard drives. This is claimed to be the largest computing system in the world, and that also raises barriers for anyone entering the field of Web search - most of companies out there can only imagine a Beowulf cluster of these, let alone build them so that the Web searches are delivered within a second."
Hardware

Cirocco Live Liquid Cooled Rack 119

Posted by CowboyNeal from the big-iron-on-the-hip dept.
Mark Grant writes "Cirocco have developed a liquid cooled rack of AMD Duron 1.1Gs in a Beowulf cluster. The rack has been installed in Cambridge University, England and has been under trial since Christmas. The system is being put through its paces running chemical research algorithms. Critical to Cirocco's liquid cooling system are the hot swappable quick couplings. These allow servers to be disconnected whilst the cooling system is in operation." The graph with live temperature readings is pretty neat.
Space

Do Comets go Poof? 40

Posted by timothy from the they-just-melt-away dept.
lwbecker2 writes "IEEE Computing in Science and Engineering Magazine has a free story online about scientists try to solve the mystery of where all the missing comets are going. Do they go Poof? Interesting information on the modelling and simulation of the Universe including the use of Mathematica and Beowulf clusters."
Science

The Top Ten Physics Highlights of 2002 183

Posted by michael from the physics-is-phun dept.
Ocelot Wreak writes "Physics Web has a cool summary of The Top Ten Physics Highlights of 2002. These include anti-atoms, neutrino oscillation - a finding that requires new physics beyond the Standard Model, defying the second law of thermodynamics, and using neutrons to measure quantum gravitational effects, amongst others. For some reason, the Slashdot Effect and the latest research on iPod-based Beowulf clusters were not included..."
Hardware

Coolest Cluster Ever 279

Posted by chrisd from the love-them-shuttle-cases dept.
sw155kn1f3 writes "Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory built a cheap (less than $1k per unit) 294-unit Beowulf claster dedicated to run astrophysics calculations. According to their website it's 85th fastest computer in the world. Seems cool and promising as it made with cheap components and off the shelf hardware."
Linux

Linux Clusters Finally Break the TeraFLOP barrier 223

Posted by michael from the faster-kernel-compiles dept.
cworley submitted - several times - this well-linked submission about a slightly boring topic - fast computers. "Top500.org has just released its latest list of the world's fastest supercomputers (updated twice yearly). For the first time, Linux Beowulf clusters have joined the teraFLOP club, with six new clusters breaking the teraFLOP barrier. Two Linux clusters now rank in the Top 10: Lawrence Livermore's "MCR" (built by Linux NetworX ) ranks #5 achieving 5.694 teraFLOP/s, and Forecast Systems Laboratory's "Jet" (built by HPTi) ranks #8 reaching 3.337 TeraFLOP/s. Other Linux clusters surpassing the teraFLOP/s barrier include: LSU's "SuperMike" at #17 (from Atipa ), the University at Buffalo at #22 and Sandia National Lab at #32 (both from Dell ), an Itanium cluster for British Petroleum Houston at #42 (from HP ), and Argonne National Labs at #46 (from Linux NetworX ) reached just over the one teraFLOP/s mark with 361 processors. In the previous Top500 list compiled last June, the fastest Intel based Netfinity 1024 processor clusters from IBM were sub-teraFLOP/s and the University of Heidelberg's AMD based "HELICS" cluster (built by Megware ) held the top tux rank at #35 with 825 GFLOP/s."
Hardware

Developing a New Beowulf Architecture? 86

Posted by Cliff from the finding-the-bottleneck dept.
Peter Gant asks: "By day I'm the sys admin on a mixed Windows / Linux environment but in my spare time I work on a small Beowolf system comprising eight nodes and a small rack, it's only small but it's mine . The system is put together using 100Mb network cards and a switch and this is that part that's been bugging me, I have a system where the slowest CPU runs at 600MHz but the network links run at (assuming a single start and stop bit) ten million bytes a second. There are of course better ways of doing this. I could rip out all of the 100Mb cards and fit gigabit ethernet running over copper or fiber but most switches only have a single gigabit port and multiple-port gigabit switches are damned expensive. There's also the possibility of using Myrinet but unless I mortgage the house and sell my girlfriend into slavery this isn't a realistic option." It gets more detailed in the article. If you are interested in Beowulf discussions, maybe this question will provide some grist for the grey matter.
Technology

Oracle's GPL Linux Firewire Clustering 168

Posted by CmdrTaco from the not-a-bad-idea dept.
Smoking writes "It seems that Oracle just released libraries to allow low cost Linux clustering solutions using firewire... Aside from the coolness factor (imagine a beowulf cluster of DV cameras...) it's quite new for Oracle to release GPL software. They also seem to include really useful tools for NIC failover, Wizard building framework and integration of the cluster into Gnome (via a gnomevfs plugin)."

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