Gone Quad !

Since November of 1999 I’ve been participating in grid compute projects over the Internet. The grand daddy of these of course is the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) out of Berkeley University and where the core software currently used to enable large scale grid computing over the Internet (BOINC – or Berkeley open Infrastructure for Network Computing) was developed.

Today there are just over 1,692,000 people or teams of people participating via the Internet world wide in public BOINC enabled projects and much has changed in the past 10 years – when I started doing this, SETI was really the only game in town – now there are many universities and research organisations using this technology to do what computers do best – sift through large quantities of raw data looking for patterns and similarities without ever getting bored ! One of the newer efforts is sponsored by IBM who funded the creation of the World Community Grid (WCG) which takes on projects based mainly in the medical research area. When I was still with Shell, we were approached by IBM about possibly participating as a company and partner in the World Community Grid effort and to me it seemed like a great idea.  As is true of all large companies, at any given time there can be several thousand of the 100,000 plus laptop and desktop computers in Shell sitting idle for short periods and just running their screen savers, so it seemed to me a no-brainer that this idle capacity could have been put to good use for exploring cures for cancer, AIDS, muscular dystrophy etc.  Sadly Shell management just couldn’t get their heads past the ‘what’s in it for me’ mentality so nothing happened, but I digress.

I have always built my own computers to participate in these grid computing projects, and yesterday marked a real milestone as I put into service my first AMD powered quad-core box !  I’ve had a soft spot for AMD ever since my first heady experience with their (at the time) screamingly fast 40 MHz 386DX with which I upgraded my Packard Bell 12 MHz 286 back in the early 1990’s. I normally dedicate five boxes to grid computing work, and just rebuild them with new components when they eventually fail, which happens about every 18 months. For my latest round of upgrades, I picked up a couple of ASUS motherboards, AMD quad core processors and some RAM from a local outfit here in Calgary, Memory Express, that has a good selection of components as well as reasonable pricing.

There is just something nerdishly fascinating about watching the Ubuntu system monitor graphs showing all four CPU’s ramping up for the first time to 100% utilisation as they get busy with more World Community Grid number crunching ! Naturally after the first successful boot I did the Dilbert Engineer’s Victory Dance as the first new quad-core equipped box in my collection of homebuilt specials came on-line and started working to find potential cancer cures, as well as possible cures for other world problems related to clean energy or food production. Its all for a very good cause, and as SWMBO’d can confirm, such occassions are just about the only times I ever do dance ! For a full list of the projects I’ve been contributing to, you can check here which also contains a link you can select if you want to join my team and do some good for the world whenever your own screen saver kicks in.

And of course, I am still contributing CPU cycles to SETI as well ………..

Getting Organised

Well it isn’t even close to being Spring, but it was time to do some hard drive cleanup, so I’ve spent the past few days sorting through the hard drives of my in-home server, backups and the machine I use for photo editing and video processing. As I wrote here last year,  I have been using the Amazon S3 service as an off-site place to store my photos and I use Bucket Explorer as the front end/user interface. The combination works incredibly well, and so when my brother-in-law John was asking about what off-site storage option he should consider for his several thousands of photos, I had no trouble recommending it to him as an option to explore.

John is the same fellow whom I convinced to by an iMac, as he really wanted to just use a computer rather than have to figure out how it worked, and he has been very pleased with it. I am still running Microsoft’s XP for photo work only because I’ve invested time learning Microsoft Digital Image 10 suite for processing my photos, which is similar to iPhoto on the Mac, and I am comfortable using it. Sadly, Digital Image Pro 10 has been dropped as a standalone product by Microsoft, although some of its elements have since been merged into Vista. While I suppose I could change out XP for Vista, (and I actually do have a couple of copies of Vista sitting in boxes unopened)  based on my experience while working on the pilot to deploy Vista in Shell, it would frankly seem more like a down grade from XP rather than an improvement.  I suppose I’ll either have to wait for Vista’s replacement called Windows 7 to be released  and look at it then (actually not till after at least its first service pack is released of course), or perhaps move fully over to Ubuntu’s version of Linux which is what I have running on most of my other machines – or just buy a Mac and not have to mess around as much as you do with Windows products. We’ll see what happens.   

As I started into the disc cleanup, it became quickly obvious that I needed something that would allow me to easily check folders and files for duplications and differences in file size, content, etc. I wanted to be able to ensure the photos were sorted, and at the same time be certain that none of the versions of the photos were lost or possibly over written due to having the same file name and yet be different in some way (colour corrected copies, cropped or scaled copies etc).  There are quite a few utilities available to help you manage these sorts of issues, and it is disappointing that something isn’t built into the MSWindows OS as it is a fairly basic requirement. After doing some checking around, I decided to try  a freeware product called WinMerge, and I have to admit I really like it. It sort of reminds me of another utility I used many years ago called F31, although it is much more sophisticated. You can do light weight comparisons based on just date and size, or more extensive binary file comparisons to determine differences in files sharing the same name, and then synchronising the contents of the directories is a snap. Quite useful.

As I type this, I’m just waiting for my updated photo library uploads into Amazon’s S3 environment to complete, then I’ll refresh the copy that I keep on a removable hard drive which I keep stored in our safety deposit box after which I’ll be ready to start on my next little project – scanning and storing my slides, negatives, family films and also a few audio cassette tapes that my grandparents made for us as children.  As they are long gone these many years, it is nice to still be able to listen to them once and a while – and ideally I’ll get the tapes converted before it becomes impossible to find a way to play them !  

I expect this will keep me busy for a little while …….