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Overcoming the Challenges of Developing Programs for the Cell Processor
In June 2008, Los Alamos National Lab announced the achievement of a numerical goal to which computational scientists have aspired for years—its newest Linux-powered supercomputer, named Roadrunner, had reached a measured performance of just over one petaflop. In doing so, it doubled the performance achieved by the world's second fastest supercomputer, the Blue Gene/L at Lawrence Livermo
Increase Performance, Reliability and Capacity with Software RAID
In the late 1980s, processing power and memory performance were increasing by more than 40% each year. However, due to mechanical limitations, hard drive performance was not able to keep up. To prepare for a “pending I/O crisis”, some researchers at Berkeley proposed a solution called “Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks”. The basic idea was to combine several drives so they appear as one la
Massively Parallel Linux Laptops, Workstations and Clusters with CUDA
NVIDIA's CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) makes programming and using thousands of simultaneous threads straightforward. CUDA turns workstations, clusters—and even laptops—into massively parallel-computing devices. With CUDA, Linux programmers can address real-time programming and computational tasks previously possible only with dedicated devices or supercomputers.
<Cooking with Linux - Warp-Speed Blogging
What are you doing, François? You have been sitting there working on that message for almost an hour. Surely your cousin doesn't need to know every detail regarding our wine cellar—after all, you told me you wanted to let him know about yesterday's wine, not all of them. Quoi? This is a different cousin? And, you had to let your parents know, and yo
Hack and / - Memories of the Way Windows Were
I'm a half-organized person. On one hand, if something of mine has a place, I can be pretty anal about making sure I put it back every time I use it. On the other hand, if something doesn't have a place, it inevitably ends up in a pile or a junk drawer. I've learned that if I want to be organized, I must give everything a home.
The same rule applies to my desktop environment. Back when
Use Python for Scientific Computing
As computers become more and more powerful, scientific computing is becoming a more important part of fundamental research into how our world works. We can do more now than we could even imagine just a mere decade ago.
Most of this work has been done traditionally in more low-level languages, such as C or FORTRAN. Originally, this was done in order to maximize the efficiency of the code
Work the Shell - Pushing Your Message Out to Twitter
Holy cow, have we really been working on the movie trivia Twitter stream for almost a year now? This surely must be the longest time-per-line-of-code project in the history of software development.
Previous columns have combined to give us a set of shell scripts that scrape the Internet Movie Database (IMDb, www.imbd.com) for its top 250 list, then pull
Google Finally Gives Up the Ghost – Er, Source
Google's Linux-based Android mobile phone platform is the talk of the town this week, as just about everything heretofore unseen makes a grand public appearance.
Network Upgrade for Kubuntu Desktops (8.04 LTS -> 8.10)
My last post outlined how to upgrade your Ubuntu desktop from 8.04 LTS to 8.10. This post addresses those fans of the bling that is KDE.
To upgrade your Kubuntu 8.04 system to 8.10 follow these few steps:
Use the shortcut key “Alt+F2″. Within the resulting dialog box enter:
kdesu “adept_manager –dist-upgrade-devel”
You should then see a prompt for “Version Upgrade”. Select this and follow the prompts.
Both Kubuntu and Ubuntu desktops should be pretty seamless to upgrade using these steps.
Other Points of Interest
Installing The Adobe Flash Plugin 10 On A 64bit Ubuntu 8.04
Installing The Adobe Flash Plugin 10 On A 64bit Ubuntu 8.04
This tutorial shows how you can install the Adobe Flash plugin 10 on a 64bit Ubuntu 8.04 desktop. Although Adobe does not provide a Flash 10 plugin for x86_64 Linux, this is possible with a little script provided by queleimporta.com.
Lazy Linux: 11 secrets for lazy cluster admins
Installing The Adobe Flash Plugin 10 On Ubuntu 8.04 (i386)
Installing The Adobe Flash Plugin 10 On Ubuntu 8.04 (i386)
This tutorial shows how you can install the Adobe Flash plugin 10 on an Ubuntu 8.04 desktop. Although this sounds quite trivial, there are a few problems along the way, especially if Flash 9 is already installed.
Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL And SquirrelMail (Mandriva 2009.0 i386)
Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL And SquirrelMail (Mandriva 2009.0 i386)
This document describes how to install a Postfix mail server that is based on virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. I'll also demonstrate the installation and configuration of Courier (Courier-POP3, Courier-IMAP), so that Courier can authenticate against the same MySQL database Postfix uses. The resulting Postfix server is capable of SMTP-AUTH and TLS and quota (quota is not built into Postfix by default, I'll show how to patch your Postfix appropriately). Passwords are stored in encrypted form in the database (most documents I found were dealing with plain text passwords which is a security risk). In addition to that, this tutorial covers the installation of Amavisd, SpamAssassin and ClamAV so that emails will be scanned for spam and viruses. I will also show how to install SquirrelMail as a webmail interface so that users can read and send emails and change their passwords.
Keeping An Eye On Your Internet Speed With Netspeed (GNOME/Ubuntu 8.04)
Keeping An Eye On Your Internet Speed With Netspeed (GNOME/Ubuntu 8.04)
Netspeed is a GNOME applet that shows the current down- and upload bandwidth of a network device. You can use it to keep an eye on your Internet speed, for example. This guide shows how to install it on an Ubuntu 8.04 desktop.
KDE Shines Up New User Forum
The KDE Project — the desktop environment preferred by 43% of Linux Journal readers — likes to hear from its users. From annual conferences to IRC channels, KDE is listening — and beginning last week, they have a new opportunity to hear what the people have to say.
Logical Volume Manager: How can I extend a Volume Group?
Logical Volume Manager: How can I extend a Volume Group?
It is a good choice to use LVM on Linux. It provides flexible storage management than any other traditional physical partitoning. With LVM, you can easily create, delete, resize storage volumes. First of all, if you want to know what LVM is, there are many documents on the Internet. In this example we will learn how to extend a Volume Group size.
Network Upgrades for Ubuntu Desktop (8.04 LTS -> 8.10)
Upgrading from Ubuntu 8.04 to Ubuntu 8.10 desktop can be very simple, and can be managed by the integrated update-manager tool. Here I’ll outline a method for upgrading in just a few easy steps. Before you dive into the upgrade there are a few things to verify:
- Be sure that you’ve applied all available updates to your current system.
- You should also read the Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid” release notes, to be aware of any known issues and workarounds.
After you’ve completed the two preparation steps you’re ready to move on to the upgrade. One thing to keep in mind at this point is that this will use the network to complete the upgrade. If you’re doing this on release day it may be slow due to the heavy load on the servers. You may try alternate mirror locations for improved speeds.
To begin the upgrade use the key combination “ALT-F2″ within your Gnome Desktop to launch the run-dialog. Within that entry dialog enter:
update-manager –devel-release
Click the “Check” button. If there are any remaining updates to Ubuntu 8.04 you’ll be prompted to install those. Once all updates are applied you will see a new dialog notifying you that a new release is available. Click “Upgrade” to begin the upgrade process.
Simply follow the prompts and you’re done. This process will download the updates needed, notify you of what will be installed, upgraded or removed and allow you to cancel or continue when you’re ready. Enjoy!
Other Points of Interest
Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid” Upgrade / Install Series
Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid” Release Candidate will be out by the end of the week, and the final by the end of the month. I want to spend the next week outlining all the different methods of upgrading and installing. If you’re planning on upgrading to final you’ll be able to find step-by-step instructions here.
I’ll begin tomorrow with upgrading via your update-manager.
Other Points of Interest
Installing Xbox Media Center (XBMC) On Fedora 9 (i386)
Installing Xbox Media Center (XBMC) On Fedora 9 (i386)
The Xbox Media Center (XBMC) is a media center application for Linux, Mac, and Windows that allows you to manage/watch/listen to/view your videos, music, and pictures. It has a nice interface, can be controlled from the desktop or a remote control or via its built-in web interface, and it can be extended by custom scripts. This guide shows how you can install XBMC on a Fedora 9 desktop (i386).
The FreeBSD Series
I’ve spent a few hours this evening putting together some articles on installing and configuring FreeBSD 7.0. So far the articles cover installation, configuring a minimalist desktop, sound, boot config, etc and will span over the next week. These posts are on blog.zelut.org.
Also, many thanks to all the comments and resources regarding getting started. Those that I’ve been able to look at have been very helpful so far.
Other Points of Interest
