Theodore Omtzigt's Blog (11)

I just came across Matt Raible's report on the OSCON'08. A couple of tidbits from that post: IT jobs are 2.3% of all jobs posted, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Technology oriented companies (e.g., Google, Yahoo, Sun) make heavy use of Open Source (40% of all jobs posted by Y!). Open source is growing faster in non-tech companies. Of the open source technologies in the enterprise, the highest share of jobs is… Continue

I came across a wonderful, somewhat tongue in cheek, posting by Edmund Freeman here. Anyone that has been asked to do an analysis to support decision making will recognize these principles. Here they go: Certainty Principle: Certainty is inversely proportional to knowledge Anyone that works with data will understand the limitations of data and any inference analysis or signal processing. When maki… Continue

I was looking for a classification of algorithms used in Computational Science and Engineering for Stillwater's trifecta. In all classification problems, selecting the right attributes is key. I was on the wrong path since I was trying to use a classification based on solver algorithm structure and that caused significant problems since it appears to cause a decoupling of the physical intuition of the original problems. So I started to look for others who have attempted to construct a structure… Continue

While researching climate models I came across a BOINC based community for climate prediction: climateprediction.net at http://www.climateprediction.net From their website: The aim of climateprediction.net is to investigate the approximations that have to be made in state-of-the-art climate models. By running the model thousands of times (a 'large ensemble') we hope to find out how the model responds to slight tweaks to these approximations - slight enough to not make the approximations any le… Continue

I have started a blog on high-productivity cloud computing on Blogger. You can read about it here: http://stillwater-cse.blogspot.com Continue

The social network for Computational Science and Engineering was created to bring together researchers and practisioners of computational science with the goal to accelerate discussion of techniques and ideas that would improve computational methods or help connect people to these ideas. These discussions have not been forth coming so we should figure out how this network can live up to its potential. Let's see if we as a collective can come up with a way to make this network work for us. 1- Ho… Continue

In the old economy, distribution channels were king. An invention only had value if you could incorporate it in a product and you had the ability to distribute that product. In today's global economy, particularly large organizations are prone to being blocked from innovation because of small inventors. This is a no-win situation for large companies since beating up on a small vendor or innovator will be broadcast on the internet in a millisecond and will harm their brands. Some industries have… Continue

IDC came out with its quarterly report on the overall supercomputing market, reporting that the market grew by a whopping 18 percent compared to the same quarter last year. This dwarfs growth in other sectors of the computing market. IDC estimates the supercomputing market around $12B in 2007. Growth in this market is driven by two factors: 1- The university market is expanding due to increasing budgets in the EU, and through partnerships with private firms and larger aggregated department bud… Continue

Talking about the World Community Grid, Stillwater has a team that is working on several Community projects. Discovering Dengue Drugs FightAIDS@Home And now the new Nutritious Rice for the World. You can join the Stillwater team by downloading the World Community client software, setting up a user name and than associating your client to the "Stillwater Supercomputing" team. We have about 10 CPUs in the team right now and we sure could use more. Once we get of the order of 250 CPUs, we plan t… Continue

Researchers at the University of Washington embarked on a program to find new strains of rice that offer more higher production yields and/or provide more nitritional value. The researchers are working with the IBM World Community grid to launch a new program that will leverage the processing power inherent in the unused and donated computational resources of one million individual PCs. The new initiative is called "Nutritious Rice for the Word". The available compute power in the World Communit… Continue

IBM announced May 13th a next generation Cell processor implemented on a 65nm process. The original Cell for the PlayStation was a 90nm design. The product name is PowerXCell 8i and will be the processor in the Road Runner system now under construction at Los Alamos. Road Runner on paper is the most powerful machine ever build, faster than the BlueGene P which is based on a low-power dual core PowerPC core especially packaged to increase density. Full story at EE Times: http://www.eetimes.com/n… Continue