The PR release with several links to astronomy information is here. The US National Virtual Observatory site, part of a $10 million NSF project, has links to four classes of products developed so far, with a broad range of information. Most of this is technical for astronomical science, but there are also several overview documents and a compressed movie under Publications. Look for "NVO Movie". Read about what a 'Virtual Observatory' is in Science News.
Ethernet Power in this case is an IEEE standard (802.3af-2003) for delivering almost 13 watts of electrical power over a standard Ethernet cables. See the story at http://www.commsdesign.com/story/OEG20030623S0049
That's the title of an interesting and lengthy Inquirer article that discusses the potential for AMD's new chip, and the possible responses by Intel. I don't often recommend articles on current technology, but this one has some thoughtful points to raise. Here's the opener:
AMD's Opteron: Does it measure up?
Is the mainstream IT media in Intel's pocket?
By Mario Rodrigues: Thursday 19 June 2003, 12:17WITH ALL OF the delays, Hammer (AMD64) has been a long time coming. Since its formal announcement some four years ago, Hammer has generated a truck load of hype, but has the wait been worth it? If allegations of Intel strong- arming are true, then the chip giant takes Hammer to be a very serious threat indeed. When AMD launched Opteron, it was pretty much a server product launch, as there were no workstation boards available. Of course, this will soon change.
The article details Intel's FUD tactics and danger for future Itanium and Xeon sales. Current tight economic times emphasize economics and smooth upgrades, now critical issues when companies evaluate servers. If you have any server purchases coming up, this article should be a mandatory read.
Does the phrase 'supercomputer in a closet' strike a strange note for you? How about the idea of IBM's Blue Horizon being the last dinasour of the supercomputer era? Blue Horizon has 42 towers and takes 1500 square feet of floor space. Read about Supercomputing in Small Spaces in Supercomputer News.
The University of Liverpool today unveiled a new supercomputer cluster which is expected to be one of the World's 100 most powerful systems when it goes live next month. Also, U.S. and European scientists have set a new data transfer speed record, shattering the previous mark using nothing but good old fashioned Ethernet. Read more on this news in Supercomputer News.
A large attraction of FreeBSD 5.X is a number of new features. These new features and functionality generally involve large architectural changes that were not feasible to port back to the FreeBSD 4-STABLE development branch. Check out the features list in BSD News.
In the Digital Library area, Steven Harnard has written an excellent letter about the different Dlib objectives and some conflicts that are hampering the filling of these archives. His letter plus the links are a good overview of this complex situation. Recommended. Read more in Digital Library Updates.
Ghu willing and the river don't rise, I presume. While no one likes schedule slips, the Release Engineering (RE) folks at FreeBSD will slip rather than ship something that does not meet requirements.
When I was a QA Manager in the 1970s for POS software, I held a number of releases because of (up to) five pages of spec failures. Back then, it was a major fight because Marketing was used to delivering on time, regardless of errors, then fixing in the field for up to six weeks. After nine months of QA experience, we were delivering code that ran out of the box in a complex 3 tier environment.
Because of that experience, I really appreciate the courage of the FreeBSD RE team to slip rather than ship. What's important is that the code work right. This is one of several things that makes me prefer FreeBSD to Linux distributions. A new reason is that FreeBSD is not a target for SCO royalties. The latest status for FreeBSD releases is here.
From the OAI General mailing list, an announcement and link to the updated code for Dspace 1.1 is here. The FreeBSD project has planned AMD-64 support for release 5.2 - read more here. My apologies for the delay in posting these May notes.
The schedule for FreeBSD 5.1 has slipped from June 2 to June 5, 2003. The latest status for FreeBSD releases is here.
FreeBSD is a primary choice for large web sites and database operations. Many web sites use databases for storage of articles and user forums. But beyond that, FreeBSD can support DB greater than Terabyte size efficiently, making it a good choice for internal company DB operations. Combined with one of the DB that are listed here, companies have a real option to replace expensive commercial DBs with open source OS and DB software for the cost of education and training.
Read about the four popular DBs and the six newer DBs that are available from the FreeBSD Ports collection: FreeBSD Databases. Much of the data for this article was sourced from the FreeBSD website and reorganized into specific databases, supporting tools and cross database tools. Links to the home pages of all ten databases are included.
Despite the near ubiquity of computers, paper still plays a critical part in business and our lives. The paperless society has been expected since the 1980s, but technology isn't even close to replacing this essential tool of our civilization.
Along with the good of paper comes the problems of too much paper, organization and storage of same, and critically, finding the one needed sheet of paper in a room full of four drawer file cabinets. Fire hazard and insurance raise costs, IRS and business requirements just make it harder to dispose.
In many cases, converting paper to digital images or to digital text files is a good solution. Which piles of paper can and should be converted is a decision each business and individual must make for themselves.
If this option seems like a way to cut the paper mountain in your house or business down to size, then read on in Convert Paper to Digital Files.
An impressive range of tutorials will be offered at the 2003 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), which will take place in Houston, Texas on May 27-31. Tutorials will cover compelling topics such as usability testing, XML & XSL, SRW, geospatial and AV digital libraries, open content licenses, and the Open Archives Initiative, and are given by experts in the field. For more information or to register, please see the conference web site at http://www.rice.edu/jcdl03/. More details in Digital Library Updates.
April 28, 2003 -- The National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative (NMI) today issued its third release of software tools carefully chosen for their value and ability to interoperate as part of the emerging NSF cyberinfrastructure for 21st century science and engineering. Available free to the public at http://www.nsf-middleware.org/, NMI-R3 has components developed at universities and national laboratories, designed to fill functions needed by the research and education community such as user authentication and authorization, resource identification and allocation, job management, and scheduling. More details in Grid News.
There are a number of science news and update items crossing my desk recently, and I want to add a specific page for these entries. So I've added a new link entry:Science News and Updates
Researchers with the NPACI at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) have released version 2.3.2 of the NPACI Rocks cluster toolkit for both 64-bit and 32-bit processors. In addition, The Portland Group(TM) Compiler Technology team of STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM) announced the availability of a Beta Release of the PGI(R) Workstation 5.0 Fortran and C compilers for AMD Opteron(TM) processors. See Supercomputer News.
PostgreSQL 7.3 is now available for OS/2 and eCS. I've also just read that eCS 1.1 has finally gone to manufacturing. A tip of the hat to the eCS folks for taking the time to do it right. More on eCS 1.1 when I try it out. Check out OS/2 Updates.
Dlib Update
From the OAI-general mailing list:
Michael Nelson has implemented the Open Archives
Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
(OAI-PMH). See Digital Library Updates.
No One Home
After three plus years and something more than the 3557 counted work units (WUs), I've pulled the plug on Seti@Home. The reason is simple - Seti is dropping more and more WUs and has not responded in any way to complaints (mine and others) or even acknowledged that there is a problem. I'm not going to spend cpu time and energy to fill a bit bucket. There are better choices available now that did not exist when I started with Seti. Goodbye ET.
It looks like DARPA doesn't want us to have a really good firewall - it might hamper access by those new Homeland Security folks. Read about the cancelled POSSE project. I've added a link to an interesting article on building OpenBSD firewalls from earlier times. With all the improvements despite the cancelled project, OpenBSD looks to be an optimum choice for firewalls and possibly other Internet server applications. Check out BSD News.
FreeBSD 4.8 was released on April 3rd. More details and links in BSD News. Two new items have been added to Dlib Updates - Caltech's collection of Dlibs and a list of open Dlib tools. See Digital Library Updates. Finally, I've collected a few links on the serious issue of Computers, Freedom and Privacy (CFP). There are substantial long term risks to all of us, so please check it out.
Sunday night, April 13th, my second workstation suffered a double catastrophic failure. Both the new 512 MB DDR memory and the primary 9G hard disk failed hard. After two days of recovery efforts, both have to be written off (and RMA replaced). Work has begun rebuilding with older SDR memory and the second disk.
Unfortunately, my backups were not up to date, for which I have no excuse. I lost about a month's worth of work, including some for my upcoming column. To add insult to injury, all my email for the last month that goes to bwrite /AT/ ywave /DOT/ com has also been lost. Anyone exchanging email with me in the last few weeks, please resend the last few letters.
Thanks. And get your backups up to date. :-{{
The first Cray X1 production results are in and they are impressive. The X1 delivers very good performance with untuned software. Each X1 processor can deliver 4 gigaflops in the 32 processor array. Details in Supercomputer News.
Digital Libraries are rapidly developing into large treasuries of information, yet the problem of finding the right needle in the library stack remains difficult. To attack this, the NKOS working group is holding a workshop to improve the use of metadata and other knowledge representation techniques to make knowledge mapping more useful. Find more here in Dlib Updates.
Open Darwin updated and plans for AMD-64 OS support in BSD News. Also, the full list for AMD's X86-64 support covers:
Super Networks and Computers:
Big changes are planned for the nation's research infrastructure. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced plans for a major expansion of the network, systems and participants who use this system. Also two supercomputers go on line for production use. All this in Supercomputer News.
SDSC (San Diego Supercomputer Center) has announced a data oriented supercomputer from IBM. It is designed to handle (huge, immense, awesome) amounts of data, measured in petabytes (thousands of terabytes). Check out Supercomputer News.
Next in software news, we have some OS/2 information from the POSSI newsletter and a C/C++ Development Tool for the open source platform Eclipse.
Last but not least, a Digital Library Update, including a list of meetings about archiving scholarly papers, a workshop and several useful links to Open Archiving sites. All of this from Stevan Harnard via the EPrints underground mailing list.
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