64 Bit Blog

Bobby Fischer 1943-2008

mswaine — 2008-01-18T10:57:16-05:00

When every blog says, "Here's my two bits,"
It seems a stretch to speak of 64.

Why I love writing online: Reason 99

mswaine — 2007-12-23T16:24:50-05:00

Of the many things I love about electronic publishing is that I will never be compelled to atone for a bad prediction by running my words through a blender and drinking the resulting text-smoothie in front of hundreds of people.

The Apple of their eye

mswaine — 2007-12-19T16:32:58-05:00

In a long series on Apple's encroachments into what we are now supposed to call 'the enterprise,' Andrew Burger at MacWorldNews takes time out to talk about how and why Apple is so popular in scientific computing.

Google trawls for knols

mswaine — 2007-12-16T15:15:18-05:00

Udi Manber has quite a sense of humor.

Google's VP of Engineering wonders on his personal website, "Why is there no synonym for 'thesaurus'?" I wonder why someone so interested in online content hasn't substantially updated his personal website in ten years.

Tapping into Unstructured Data

mswaine — 2007-12-08T17:41:04-05:00

Bill Inmon coined the term 'data warehousing,' wrote the first book on the subject, and held the first conference on data warehousing. Lately he's turned his attention to the broader challenge of managing unstructured textual data.

Apple's ZFS

mswaine — 2007-11-29T12:40:52-05:00

It's Sun's ZFS, of course, but I've been tracking news of Apple's implementation of Sun's Zettabyte File System, and I'm not the only one.

Coming to Reno

mswaine — 2007-11-11T13:52:19-05:00

Here are a few more of the folks exhibiting or presenting at SC07, the ACM/IEEE-sponsored International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, running from November 10th through the 16th at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center.

SC07 Update

mswaine — 2007-11-09T13:15:26-05:00

SC07, the ACM/IEE-sponsored International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, runs from November 10th, that's tomorrow, through the 16th at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center. Here are some of the companies and products I know of that will be appearing at SC07.

Sun gets smart about music recommendation

mswaine — 2007-11-04T17:33:02-05:00

I grew up on "American Bandstand," and I used to cringe when it came to the Rate a Record segment, because I knew that the kids were going to give the record a totally meaningless numerical rating and when Dick Clark asked why they gave it an 87 or whatever it was, they would invariably say, "It has a good beat and I can dance to it."

HPC in Reno

mswaine — 2007-10-26T14:03:15-05:00

Next month, supercomputing folks from all over the world will be converging on northwest Nevada for a major high performance computing conference. I'll be there. Will you?

The Simplest Turing Machine Has Been Proven Universal

mswaine — 2007-10-18T21:03:34-05:00

This spring, Stephen Wolfram offered $25,000 for the first person to prove that a very simple Turing machine has the property of being universal. A 20 year old has won the prize.

Tweaking C for mesh-based physics code

mswaine — 2007-10-15T11:18:24-05:00

Jeff Keasler dropped me a line to let me know about a C language extension he's written for mesh-based physics coding. Stuff like finite differences.

Be a super(computing) fellow

mswaine — 2007-10-11T14:13:39-05:00

Budget surplus: there's a phrase you don't hear much these days. Even rarer: they want to know whether they should give some of it to you.

Fortran, Numerics, and MacOS: Strange Bedfellows?

kcarlson — 2007-07-23T16:26:10-05:00

The answer to that question is: Not really. You might not think of Fortran when you think of modern programming, and modern operating systems. But despite it not being the flavor of the moment, there are good reasons not to count Fortran out. In addition to there being huge codebases already in existence that no one feels any need to rewrite, Fortran is still quite a strong choice for high performance computing and numerics. Jon Erickson talks to Wood Lotz, president of Absoft, about the IMSL Fortran Numerical Library, recently ported to MacOS.

RapidMind In Depth

kcarlson — 2007-06-18T12:39:16-05:00

I know we've talked about RapidMind before in this space. (Jon Erickson recently interviewed RapidMind's chief scientist, Michael McCool.) But there's a lot more to say. McCool and RapidMind founder Stefanus Du Toit take us on a technical tour through coding an app for multicore processors using RapidMind. The basic premise? Instead of spending your time optimizing your algorithms for multicore, or learning custom languages or environments, let your tools worry about the multithreading.