Øblog

Måned: mars 2007

  • PS3 and distributed computing

    Its exciting to see that the number of PS3 clients on Folding@Home is increasing. A few in europe has activated their clients, but since its release day in europe I bet that most of the new owners want to test their games first.

    At this moment 11172 PS3 CPUs has been registered at Standford, the stats were updated 11:45 today. Together, the PS3 CPUs reports a total of 251 TFlops, not bad. I’m a bit curious about the fact that 172532 reported CPUs using Windows report a total of 151 TFlops. Hmmm

    I bet the number is 50000 next monday.

    If you’re interested, check out the stats on http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats

  • Y2K7 this weekend

    This weekend we will see the consequences of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 where the USA daylight saving time will start march 11th instead of April 1st. Some says its a new Y2K event and some shrugs and laugh it away. Have we mapped all consequences?

    Microsoft and Apple has released patches for this but my opinion is that desktop computers is the least source of worries. Routers, switches, servers, cellular trancievers/receivers, satellites, servers and servers applications will also be touched. Have everyone upgraded their firmwares on GPS based systems? Many were told to wait til january 2007, some beta-firmwared their chipsets and a large portion is beginning to feel the headache today as they realize they have to ship new ROMs today. The poor souls that upgraded their firmware in august 2006 to prepare themselves had to downgrade again and wait til november.

    Applications that runs old versions of JRE (Java Runtime Environment) may report wrong time after this Sunday, since JRE stores every daylight saving time rule around the world. Fun? And if you run IBM’s websphere you might want to look at this.

    How will Kerberos behave in all this? Did you update your HP-server? 🙂

    All of the above have been background activity the last couple of years, no need to worry the consumers. The biggest worry for many americans is «will my Blackberry calendar work?», «will my VCR tape the wrong shows»? etc. 🙂

    Good luck this weekend, and don’t forget to visit Standard Time. heh

  • New external graphic cards

    ATI/Amd and Asus are about to release external graphic cards. Asus’ is ready this spring but unfortunately we wont be able to purchase the component seperately, it will be sold with new portables only. For now. ATI/Amd’s new device code named ‘Lasso’ takes the unit to the next step, it will be possible to bind more than one graphic card to the unit.

    The GPU (Graphical Prosessing Unit) is not just a graphic card, it is a master of math, graphic is all math. The GPU will relief the main CPU of heavy mathwork. Which bring me to Distributed Computing. It is already possible to download a GPU-client for Folding@Home and hopefully many will follow. A GPU client can speed up crunching x30/x40 compared to a CPU on certain operations. Not all GPUs are supported, and not all math operations are fitting the GPUs architecture. Folding@Home is currently supporting ATI/Amd’s X1600, X1800 and X1900 class. The Processor R580 in the X1900XT card is recommended since it has 48 pixel shaders. You will need the Catalyst drivers, which means there is no Linux client yet, but this wil be possible in near future.

    There is also activity on Cure@PS3 project, where you can use your PS3 to crunch Folding@Home packages. Here is a link to the PS3 Faq at Standford.

    Picture having a bunch of dull Linux-servers with no monitors connected, hooking on a few ‘Lasso’s on it and start crunching, I really hope more Distributed Computing projects will follow in Stanfords footsteps.

    Check out this page for an image of an early ‘Lasso’. 🙂