Entries Tagged 'Information Technology' ↓

Mark Shuttleworth names Ubuntu 11.04 (the April, 2011) scheduled release  of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution as “Natty Narwhal” in a pretty poetic piece, where he also passingly alludes to Russia having the only spaceship in service post the shuttle retirement.

And so, we come swiftly to a conclusion: allow me to introduce the Natty Narwhal, our mascot for development work that we expect to deliver as Ubuntu 11.04.

The Narwhal, as an Arctic (and somewhat endangered) animal, is a fitting reminder of the fact that we have only one spaceship that can host all of humanity (trust me, a Soyuz won’t do for the long haul to Alpha Centauri). And Ubuntu is all about bringing the generosity of all contributors in this functional commons of code to the widest possible audience, it’s about treating one another with respect, and it’s about being aware of the complexity and diversity of the ecosystems which feed us, clothe us and keep us healthy. Being a natty narwhal, of course, means we have some obligation to put our best foot forward. First impressions count, lasting impressions count more, so let’s make both and make them favourable.

via Mark Shuttleworth » Blog Archive » N-imal?.

Interestingly, Narhwal pictures seem to be pretty rare on the Internet. Here is a one hosted at National Geographic:

Nice article about multicore processing in the  July 2010 of IEEE Spectrum by David Patterson . Interesting analogy about parallel computing and news reporting.

But why is parallel processing so challenging? An analogy helps here. Programming is in many ways like writing a news story. Potentially, 10 reporters could complete a story 10 times as fast as a single reporter could ever manage it. But they’d need to divide a task into 10 equally sized pieces; otherwise they couldn’t achieve a full tenfold speedup.

Complications would arise, however, if one part of the story couldn’t be written until the rest of it was done. The 10 reporters would also need to ensure that each bit of text was consistent with what came before and that the next section flowed logically from it, without repeating any material. Also, they would have to time their efforts so that they finished simultaneously. After all, you can’t publish a story while you’re still waiting for a piece in the middle to be completed. These same issues—load balancing, sequential dependencies, and synchronization—challenge parallel programmers.

Further along:

All in all, things look pretty bleak.

But he continues:

Nevertheless, there has been progress in some communities. In general, parallelism can work when you can afford to assemble a crack team of Ph.D.-level programmers to tackle a problem with many different tasks that depend very little on one another. One example is the database systems that banks use for managing ATM transactions and airlines use for tracking reservations. Another example is Internet searching. It’s much easier to parallelize programs that deal with lots of users doing pretty much the same thing rather than a single user doing something very complicated. That’s because you can readily take advantage of the inherent task-level parallelism of the problem at hand.

Other success stories referred to are Computer Graphics, Weather Prediction (one of the workhorse applications for supercomputing – one of PARAM’s main use has been in the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF)) and simulations.

The La-Z-Boy era of program performance is now officially over, so programmers who care about performance must get up off their recliners and start making their programs parallel.

Despite these reasons for hope, the odds are still against the microprocessor industry squarely completing its risky Hail Mary pass and finding some all-encompassing way to convert every piece of software to run on many parallel processors. I and other ­researchers at the main centers of parallel-­computing research—including Georgia Tech, the University of Illinois, Rice University, Stanford, and the University of California, Berkeley—certainly don’t expect that to happen. So rather than working on general programming languages or computer designs, we are instead trying to create a few important applications that can take advantage of many-core microprocessors. Although none of these groups is likely to develop the ultimate killer app, that’s not the intention. Rather, we hope that the hardware and software we invent will contain some of the key innovations needed to make parallel programming straightforward. If we’re successful, this work should help to usher in whatever application ultimately wins the “killer” distinction.

He finishes off with:

No matter how the ball bounces, it’s going to be fun to watch, at least for the fans. The next decade is going to be interesting.

via IEEE Spectrum: The Trouble With Multicore.

I was searching for some nice free (could be free as in beer or free as in freedom) fonts for my Ubuntu system.

Found a nice set of articles at: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/tag/typography/ and they pointed me to the awesome “The League of Moveable Type”

Surprising how 2 links come up on the same day Again from Boing Boing:

Infographic byWordStream Internet Marketing

Got this link from Boing Boing.

Infographic by the PPC Blog.com

NavankurIT, a new age IT consulting organisation focused on Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for the Indian Micro, Small and Mediyum Enterprises is looking for young and dynamic students or fresh college graduates as interns for an in-house project. More details are available at http://www.navankurit.in/index.html#internship OR http://bit.ly/aUDIZh

Found a bunch of articles on C programming, especially about the standard library, linkers and loaders. These tell us about stuff that goes on under the hood and is generally glossed over, especially in formal BE courses, where one is supposed to learn and understand these things. We have an unfortunate situation that few people know how to use gcc from the command line and fewer still know how to use a command line debugger.

These articles that I got from a Slashdot article are:

• Hello from a libc-free world! (Part 1) from the ksplice blog. The article explains a lot that goes on under the hood.
• A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux

  “This document explores methods for squeezing excess bytes out of simple programs. (Of course, the more practical purpose of this document is to describe a few of the inner workings of the ELF file format and the Linux operating system. But hopefully you can also learn something about how to make really teensy ELF executables in the process.)”

These articles look to good, interesting and well written. For those interested more on this topic, do not miss Peter van der Linden's amazing book on C – “Expert C Programming”, now also available in an economical Indian edition. BTW, for anyone looking for technical books in Bangalore, your search stops at Tata Book House in the sprawling campus of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Another book for those interested in the esoteric topic of linkers and loaders is the 1999 book on the subject: “Linkers and Loaders” written by John R. Levine. The draft manuscript is available on the site, but the Indian edition (if you can find it) is surprising cheap.

P.S.: Sorry for a broken link earlier.

New feature on the all new Yahoo! Mail – hide ads and get more real estate. From the Ymail blog:

To give you more real estate to read your emails, we are adding a button just to the left of the advertisement in the All-New Yahoo! Mail. Clicking that button will hide the ad temporarily, while you read your email.

Hide Ads on Yahoo! Mail

This is a handy tool, especially if you are using a computer with a smaller screen resolution like a small laptop or netbook.

The article goes on to say the tool does not remove ads permanently:

Ads are what allow us to provide you Yahoo! Mail as a free service and hopefully they’re sometimes useful and interesting too.

And they are what pay my salary too 

via You Asked for It… A Collapse Ad Button in the All-New Yahoo! Mail.

Interesting ad that I saw while browsing Slashdot. I just couldn’t resist juxtaposing the about window of my browser here (needless to say, I am running Firefox 3) :

A challenge to create a low cost “distributed cluster storage system” described as:

• Data server: 2 units (appliances/servers) that each have a 4+ drives in a RAID5 disk set (3 active, 1 hot spare). These 2 units can be active/passive or active/active I don’t care. These two units should mirror each other in in real-time. If 1 unit fails for any reason the other picks up the load and carries on without any delay or hang time on the clients. If a unit fails, when it comes back up, I want the data to be re-synced automatically. Then the unit should “come back on-line” (assuming its normal state is active) after it is synced. It would be even more ideal if the data servers could be 1-N instead of just 1-2.
• Data clients: Each cluster node machine (the clients) in the server farm (CentOS 5.4 OS) will mount 1 or more data partitions (in read/write mode) provided by the data server(s). Multiple clients will mount the same partition at the same time in r/w, so network file locking is needed. If the a server goes down (multiple HD failure, network issue, power supply, etc) the other server takes over 100% of the traffic and the client machines never know.
• Linux CentOS will be used on the cluster nodes.

To re-cap:

• 2 data servers mirroring each other in real time.
• Auto fail over to the working server if one fails (without the clients needing to be restarted, or even being interrupted).
• Auto re-sync of the data if a failed unit comes back on-line, when the sync is done the unit goes active again (assuming its normal state is active).

Article continues to explain what has been tried and the results not achieved …

via Storage Cluster: A Challenge to LJ Staff and Readers | Linux Journal.