June 2009 Archives

Wondering how the new quad-core Intel Nehalem (Xeon 5500 series) and six-Core AMD Istanbul (Opteron 2400 series) stack up against each other on HPC-style codes? The folks at Advanced Clustering Technologies, a company that builds customized HPC clusters from standard components, have been putting the latest high-end x86 silicon through its paces, and have generated some interesting results.

Those of you who don’t have perfect children will find this familiar: Just as I was withdrawing money in a bank lobby, my 5-year-old daughter chose to throw a temper tantrum, screaming and writhing on the floor while a couple of elderly ladies looked on in disgust. (Their children, apparently, had been perfect.) I gave Dorothy a disappointed look and said, “That argument won’t work, sweetheart. It isn’t pathetic enough.”

Select your state from the list on the right to see how it compares internationally. The graph shows how your state’s average mathematics score compares to each country that participated in the 2007 Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).

Change UID/GID for a user from the command line in Leopard.

Leopard's Accounts Preference Pane also hides a set of advanced options you can use to customize user account settings. To get at the advanced options, Control-click a name in the Accounts Preference Pane, and then choose Advanced from the pop-up menu.

What environment variables are available in Windows?

Supporting Multiple Repository Access Methods

So how do you learn parallel programming? Luckily there are a number of resources on the web. Here are just a few links