The Pacific NorthWet has moved into the snow belt, or perhaps it's the other way around. Seriously, all of this Global Warming talk is based on measurements over the last few decades, with many instruments based in or near cities. The possibility that the cities' heat may have affected the results seems to have been discounted.
Even more important, the longer term record on global temperatures is clearly tied to the primary source of heat, our sun. The long term record of earth's temperature is displayed on page 127 of Nigel Calder's "The Restless Earth," a 1972 book by Viking Press. This information was also televised by BBC2 on 16 February 1972 and it may become available again when the BBC makes all their shows available on the net.
I'll simply quote part of the caption for the 800 year temperature graph:
"...Continuing the curve gives a climate 'forecast' to the start of the 21st century, which suggests cooler conditions than those of the past 70 years."
What caused me to write about this is our third local snowfall this winter. Those of you living in the snow belt will get a good laugh from that, but I have lived here since 1981 and this is the first time that I have seen snow this near sea level more than once before January. In fact, we also had our earliest snow in anyone's memory this year. On November 1st, over six inches arrived. I can hear the laughter from Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where I lived for two years. They get 20 feet of snow a year.
What makes this notable is the extreme cold weather we have also had. After the recent big solar flare (18Nov2003), we had a week of record breaking cold in this area. Temperatures that normally rarely descend below 32F have been dropping below 20F on a regular basis, and around here, that strains the electric grid with heating demands. For locals, it's just damn cold.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I want to note that I have always been sceptical about the Global Warming trend. Simply put, my reasons are based on the huge difference between solar energy input and human input, and our ignorance of how the earth's heat sinks respond to short term changes. Scientists, who were predicting an ice age in the 1960s, may have over reacted to the short term trends that have been recorded in detail only in the last four decades. In global trends, that is a very short time frame.
Wrapping up this subject and the year, I want to point out that in any event, be it global warming, cooling or simply temperature oscillation, we are decades away from having any certainty on this issue. The subject is always good for a scare headline when news is slow, so I suggest scepticism and patience should be the watchwords for now. Or in the immortal words of "The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy," "Don't Panic!"
It's getting really busy at JPL. On January 2nd, the Stardust mission will flyby the comet Wild 2 and return samples to earth Jan 16, 2006. Then, on Jan 3rd and Jan 24th 2004, two Mars Rovers will land on Mars. Read more with links in Science News. Also note updates for the great JPL websites in Science Portals.
For those of you using the KDE desktop on Linux or FreeBSD (or others), check out the KStars application under the games/edutainment listing. This is a wonderful tool/game for learning about planets, stars and galaxies. It's great fun to center on a dot and zoom in several times as a picture gradually appears. Or right click for more information and immediately download telescopic pictures and technical data. Up here in the Pacific NorthWet, it's about the only way to see the stars most nights. Recommended for explorers of all ages.
On this Christmas eve, I wish all of you the joy of the season and much happiness to come.
I've updated the GIS information to include links to Learning, Standards, Data, and Free Software. Read more about GIS in Digital Library News. Enjoy!
This day marks 100 years since the Wright brothers made the first powered flight. There is a web site dedicated to this event and aviation information. Check out the Centennial of Flight.
A GIS is a digital library of geographic information - in short, a digital map. There is far more to these systems than may appear on the surface. For this article I must credit the GIS Monitor Newsletter with tipping me off. Read more about GIS in Digital Library News.
Because this is a major release, I am including most of the release text in Large System Notes - links are at the end.
December 16, 2003 -- Today's fourth release by the National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative (NMI) includes a wide range of software, services, documents and recommendations for the effective use of information technology in research and education. NMI-R4 emphasizes open-source solutions to issues critical to collaboration across multiple organizations that may be separated by geography and by divergent local computing architectures.
Open Source has come of age. No longer does Open Source fame rely solely on systems software such as Linux, Apache and the BSD Brigade (See BSD Brigade, September 2000). In the last year, Star Office and Open Office have assulted the Microsoft throne of office suites. In the database arena, MySQL, PostgreSQL and several others have proved themselves capable of enterprise level size and performance.
All of these software packages are necessary for independence from Microsoft, but they are not sufficient for full operation of a business, even a small home business. What has been missing are essential tools for security, backup, and business processing. Today, I can comfortably state that open source covers the first two of those needs and the third, business processing, is well under way.
Read about the four gems, and where they developed as well as
news about eComStation (an upgraded OS/2) and FreeBSD 5.1 new technology.
Four Open Source Gems; eCS 1.1 and FreeBSD 5.1
In surveying current processor architectures, we can easily find an example of almost any style or theme that you might be interested in. The line between RISC, originally a Reduced Instruction Set and CISC, a Complex Instruction Set Computer, has been blurred in the last ten years. While Instruction Set Architectures (ISA) have been stable until recent developments, the battle now is between very fast single processors and slower wide parallel processors.
This battle has now been joined by the technology battle that intensifies as circuit dimensions shrink, and the power/heat battle as clock speeds race for the 10 GHz crown. That particular winner may provide both home entertainment and heating in the near future. Read about future challenges for processor designers in New Paths in Processor Architecture.
In addition, I've begun an update and expansion of the Real Community Conferencing System (RCCS) in order to clarify one of the original design objectives. The design is specifically made to support a distributed community environment of cooperating systems run by different people with individual objectives and subjects that meet their interests. This characteristic was not clearly defined in the original work and will be expanded on in the near future. You can read the overview in Index to RCCS Design Notes.
Just recently I realized that my local computer installation had gotten somewhat complex. I have a long background working with different operating systems (OS) and as a result, I don't have much difficulty working with different systems. Yesterday I realized that even my usual multi OS environment had gotten complex.
Let's make that very complex. As I write, I have two OS/2 systems, two FreeBSD 4.9 systems, one Windows NT, and one Suse 9.0 online on my local 100 Mbs network. In addition to that complex, I have an idle system that will run FreeBSD 5.2, another set of spare parts that will run RedHat 8.0 and OpenFiler in an experiment, and a planned OpenBSD 3.4 that will be a firewall.
How did I get to six operating systems, and why would I use that many? Read about my journey through 22 years of the personal computer industry, starting with my first system in 1981. It's all in Personal Experiences: Part I.
Eclipse is now over two years old, two versions delivered with a third in the oven. Check out Eclipse V3 Build M5, which was recently released. Updates in Software Tools.
Occasionally some scientific discovery gives me a chuckle, and I think you'll agree with this one. Check out Science News. Also Science Index updated.
Intel Research will be releasing an powerful Bayesian plus Graph Theory tool that can learn patterns from data streams and draw conclusions. The library is named PNL. PNL stands for Probabistic Networks Library, an implementation of Bayesian statistics and graph theory to provide tools that can learn and discover anomolies in data streams. This looks to be a remarkable set of tools for advanced software that will handle routine and not so routine tasks. Read more about this powerful tool in Software Tools.
SGI has extended its line of Altix 3000 Itanium clusters and NUMA systems to larger and smaller configurations. Recently they delivered a 512 processor single image system to NASA Ames for ocean simulation. Now read about their plans for extended capabilities in Supercomputer News.
The bit about days left until Christmas was to remind those geeks who are still glued to their web browser that's it's time to get moving. And those of you looking for a good buy on a supercomputer, I think SGI may be in an end-of-year discounting mood. :-}
When uptime is critical, OpenVMS has a record that will be very hard to beat. Six years without downtime including hardware, software and OS upgrades, and a location move! Read about the stories in Large System Notes.
SGI has been making significant strides in single image supercomputers and high end visualization graphics systems. Read about ocean simulations by NASA and F-16 simulators for the Air Force in Supercomputer News.
AMD's Opteron design is not only beating Intel's Xeon in many benchmarks, it is performing well in its first supercomputer systems. As AMD ramps the clock speed, memory bandwidth and Hypertransport performance, we can expect future Opteron supers to set new performance records. More info and links in Supercomputer News.
I've trimmed the Site Journal back - it was more than 55 KB in size. Now you can find everything earlier than October 1, 2003 linked back in a chain of Journal segments. All Journals are linked at the end to the prior segment.
Have you read George Orwell's "1984"? In this classic work, he explores the implications of a government which has the ability to watch each and every citizen and 'correct' them in real time. There is no way to break this to you gently - you are already being watched. Read about one of the commercial offerings that makes this easy in the Privacy Page.
Read about what IBM's Director of Internet Technology and Strategy thinks about the next generation of the Internet.
The the third phase of the Internet is about collaboration, he said. "The very first Internet message was LO, because the system crashed when they tried to log on. For twenty years, email and FTP was the main use of the Internet. Then the Web was created and turned it into a broadcasting medium. A few years ago Napster was invented and that showed us the power of distributed applications. Millions of people could access a network with 300,000 PCs and get what they want".
In remarkable contrast to the 3,000 square foot floor space of ASCI Q and even larger supers, this supercomputer fits in a closet - six square feet of floor space! Here is a brief description of this powerful midget. Read about it in Supercomputer News.
There is a burst of news in the science area, covering Solar flares and eclipse, Astronomical discoveries, and Hubble's possible demise. Check out these items in Science News.
Darpa will fund Cray, Sun and IBM to push the supercomputing envelope. Cray said it will define a new high-performance programming language and Sun will try to get the industry to standardize on a set of low-level software primitives. IBM will pursue extension of today's message-passing interface as part of its software strategy for a petaflops system.
Intel plans $36 million for high end projects and Sun discloses plans for a self managing storage of gargantuan size - a 1 ZettaByte storage system. More information and links in the Supercomputer News.
IBM announces speed control in the 90nm PowerPC 970 and ARS takes a look at POWER5, UltraSparc IV and Efficon. Check out more views on these in the New Processors section.
Astronomers from the University of Hawaii (UH), Institute for Astronomy (IfA) today released the first image from a gigantic new 16 Megapixel infrared camera. For New Science facilities, the Department of Energy's new road map puts fusion and supercomputers first.
A major discovery - Martian Rivers, were real says Malin Space Science Systems:
Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) has been operating in Mars orbit longer than any other spacecraft. The Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) began taking pictures in September 1997, shortly after MGS arrived. Since that time, it has only imaged about 3% of the martian surface with its high resolution (1.5 to 12 meters, 5 to 40 feet, per pixel), narrow angle (NA) camera system. Thus, an important discovery from MOC can--and does-- come at any time, even five and six years into the mission. What is important about this discovery? First, it provides clear, unequivocal evidence that some valleys on Mars experienced the same type of on-going, or, persistent, flow over long periods of time as rivers do on Earth.
Read more on all three items with links in Science News.
Check out the Top 500 fastest supercomputers at Top500. Find out where all of the fastest systems are, who builds them and how they are configured. Read about how NCSA's cluster, achieved Linpack benchmark performance- the figure used to compile the Top500 list - of 9.8 teraflops (9.8 trillion calculations per second). Also check out the Teragrid Update - the second cluster to be deployed as part of the Teragrid Project.
More information and links on these and other supercomputer updates can be found in Supercomputer News.
For a long time, supercomputers have been measured by one standard benchmark - the Linpack computation which is measured today in GigaFlops, that is Billions of Floating Point Operations per second. The current list of the top 500 systems in the world is exclusively determined by that measure.
Because of the many new uses that supercomputers are being put to, a better measure of their performance is needed. DARPA has responded with a program to develop a new set of benchmarks to better evaluate current and new supercomputer architectures. Details and links are in Supercomputer News.
From the Eprints support list, I found a link to an excellent paper by Hussein Suleman and Edward A. Fox of Virginia Tech. Titled "A Framework for Building Open Digital Libraries" ISSN 1082-9873, it outlines a powerful approach to building and extending digital libraries even while standards evolve and demand grows rapidly. An abstract and link are in Digital Library News.
News that the Blue Gene prototype reached 2 Teraflops is in Supercomputer News, and the IBM G5 Blade announcement link is in the Supercomputer Index.
SDSC, NCSA Demonstrate IBM's GPFS Across Wide Area Network. GPFS is IBM's parallel file system, which is being implemented for computing systems at NCSA and SDSC that are part of the TeraGrid system. The TeraGrid (www.teragrid.org) is a National Science Foundation project to build and deploy the world's largest, most comprehensive, distributed infrastructure for open scientific research.
NCSA, SDSC and ASCI gear up for SC03 Bandwidth Challenge. The NCSA/ASCI/SDSC entry is in the "most innovative" category. During the demonstration, the LLNL I/O application IOR will be run across four locations: the NCSA, ASCI and SDSC booths on the SC03 conference floor and a Linux cluster in the NCSA machine room at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Read more about these innovative technologies in Supercomputer News.
A record flare called a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) was recorded on November 4, 2003. It was rated as X28. Two days later, another CME saturated the SOHO detectors again, and it appears that this may be close to the record. Read more in Science News.
Transistor breaks 500 GHz. That's correct, 500 Billion Hertz! Check out the story "Illinois scientists make 509GHz transistor" at The Inquirer.
Another Digital Library software package is the CERN Document Server Software (CDSware). Read and link to program in Digital Library News.
The GRIDS Center is a "Grid Research Integration Deployment and Support Center," according to their web site. The latest version of Grid Middleware is NMI-R3.2, a maintenance release issued on October 9, 2003. It includes new versions of GSI-OpenSSH, MyProxy, gsi_openssl, and new bits for everything that depends on gsi_openssl. Read about both updates with links at Grid News.
Sony has released the first specifications for its Playstation 3 system, and it's a super number cruncher.
"A four-core chip home server system will be able to deliver one billion floating-point operations per second."
Fluctuations in the Ionosphere caused by earthquakes can be detcted by measuring the very small delay changes in signals from GPS satellites. This is a good example how science benefits from technology, and we benefit from both. Read about it in Science News.
IBM and Otigabay Systems Corp are making faster networks for supercomputers. IBM's work is R&D for petaflop machines, Otigabay Systems is a deliverable 3U rack mount system that runs at 58 GigaFlops. Read more about both in Supercomputer News.
I'm trying to catch up with the recent flood of news and have almost made it. This batch covers supers, software and science.
Java 1.3.1 from IBM, Java 1.4.1 from Golden Code and 1.4.2 from Innotek. Now OS/2 and eCS have full support for Java code. This is a big step as many important software packages, such as ArcStyler IV (Software Design/Engineering) are now written in Java. The ArcStyler Community edition is available for free download. Check out Java for OS/2 and eCS in OS/2 News, and read more about ArcStyler IV in Software Tools.
Just in time to protect your systems from the dreaded Halloween Hackers, OpenBSD 3.4 represents hundreds of changes that improve its security. The change summary list, linked below, is very extensive, and the detailed list even longer.
So thank these hard working folks by purchasing a CDROM set and/or a T shirt to support future OpenBSD work. IMNSHO, it's clearly the most secure OS available for firewall and web server use. Read the full announcement in OpenBSD News.
From FreeBSD Announce:
"I am happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE, the latest release of the FreeBSD -STABLE development branch. Since FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE in April 2003, we have made conservative updates to a number of software programs in the base system, dealt with known security issues, and merged support for large memory i386 machines with Page Address Extensions (PAE) from 5.1."See the details and links in BSD News.
The TVFS is an implementation of some Unix file concepts for OS/2. This will be specially useful for developers with Unix systems experience, and for those OS/2 and eCS advanced users who push the envelope. More on this and links in OS/2 News.
Los Alamos National Labs needs lots of storage. They are now able to order up to 600 TB, (0.6 petabytes or 600,000 Gigabytes), from Panasas. This new design storage system scales in size and speed. Also of note to fans of supercomputers, the first super to be built on the new Mac server with 2,200 IBM 970 chips is showing surprising results at over 7 Teraflops. A summary and links can be found in Supercomputer News.
PlanetLab seeks to re-create the Internet in the form of a distributed, planetwide parallel processor. Scientists would be allocated a slice of the system on which to perform any computer function now residing on their desktop or portable PC. Read more at Science News.
For those of you born in the last decade or two, the name of Cray may have only meant a computer company or a form of seafood. It is best known in the IT industry as Seymour Cray, known as the father of the supercomputer. Read more on a special page named "Cray Means Supercomputer."
Scientific American has an article about a science network for the public. This could be a valuable knowledge tool for everyone. You don't need a PhD to have a useful grounding in science. Besides, when your children ask, "Why is the sky blue?", you can give them a factual answer. eSTAR is a project to build computer programs that can detect unusual events and bring them to the immediate attention of astronomers and astrophysicists for more detailed study.
Check out the summary and links in Science News
As of December 2003, FreeBSD will have been available for ten years. Version 1.0 was released in December of 1993. From the announcement:
Full announcement in BSD News.A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...in the early part of 1993...the last 3 coordinators of the 'Unofficial 386BSD Patchkit' would go on to start the FreeBSD project that has grown to be used by millions of websites and installations around the world.
Mozilla/Firebird 0.7 is now available. Install it with the latest Innotek libc DLL. Read more in OS/2 News and Updates.
Ace's Hardware has a good overview on the server processors announced at MPF. Read about it in New Processors.
The annual Microprocessor Forum is the place for big announcements and this year was no exception. The Efficon and C5P are in the low power class. Clearspeed is a new design approach of parallel processors and low power together. This may be the multiprocessor for the rest of us.
The IBM Power5 and Fujitsu Sparc64 VI are in a class by themselves - the behemoth class. It's clear that IBM will own the very high end (if you have to ask, you can't afford it) of the SMP and cluster systems for the forseable future.
The ClearSpeed CS301 is a substantial design breakthru in parallel processing combined with low power. I expect this design to make as much difference in parallel processing as the cluster and blade concepts have in the past. An overview and links for all of these processors are in the New Processors page.
According to the FreeBSD Release page, FreeBSD 4.9 will be released as soon as October 23. Version 4.9 has a number of improvements and fixes. The biggest of these is the Page Address Extensions (PAE) support for Xeon chips that can address more than 4GB through the use of PAE.
FreeBSD 5.2 does not have a scheduled release date, but the status page shows that 5.2 is now in semi-frozen state. Currently, updates are restricted prior to the actual freeze status where only fixes are allowed.
Egenera has announced some low cost blades with virtualization software and remote management. What is unusual about this is the size - the whole unit mounts up to 24 Xeon processors in a rack mount unit twenty three inches high. Check out the Cluster and Blades section of the Supercomputer Index.
OpenVMS and the Alpha EV7x processors are in the news, except from HPC who wishes this powerful and reliable system would stop beating HPC's Itanium systems. Read about the EV7x in New Processors and the OpenVMS 7.3-2 Update in Large System Notes.
Scientific discoveries are in the news. There is finally some evidence of Dark Matter, the term scientists have used to describe the missing mass of the galaxy. Along with dark matter, scientists have some remarkable photos of what is called a 'Galaxy Eater', a larger galaxy tearing apart a smaller one that passes close by. In addition to the discoveries above, one of our nation's top universities, MIT, has released 500 OCW (Open CourseWare) courses, including science, to the world via the Internet.
First results from Japan's Earth Simulator supercomputer are being presented at a climate workshop in Cambridge, UK. Finally, for the strange and obscure corners of science, there are the Ig Nobel awards. There is summary information and links for all of these science items in Science News.
I'm making some overdue maintenance updates - cleaning up out of date files, updating links and in general, creating a consistent structure and appearance. The CPPM, Technology and Tech Management directories are still here, but were not redirected. In addition, the older RCCS article was not redirected or back linked into the index or main page.
All those details are now corrected (I hope). The new home for all of these articles is:
In the last ten days, supercomputer announcements and stories have flooded the news and I've been collecting them for a big batch. Here's a bullet list of the items:
"This Warpstock presentation will primarily cover the unique host and guest support combinations being made available, including support for OS/2 - eComStation as a guest running on Linux and FreeBSD systems. Other OSs are also supported as hosts and guests, but OS/2 on Linux is unique in the industry."
SNAP Professional 2.2.3 has a bunch of new features, including support for the latest chipsets with full acceleration, zooming, DVI output, TV out, AGP 3.0, Opteron cpus, and the latest GRADD components from IBM. Links and a summary in OS/2 Updates.
AMD plans to introduce dual core Opterons in late 2005. See New Processorsfor links and a summary.
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