Monday, November 24, 2008

Get your own supercomputer

It is something like having a Dinosaur as a pet, or spending my vacation on the moon, Regardless that you have to be rich to do .. the point here is that it is possible to do.
I was excited when I heard of it, it worth mentioning.
Nvidia has launched a "personal supercomputer".
The company already produces supercomputers, but for researches and technology research centers, the new point is that it is available for personal use.
About the Tesla personal supercomputer:
  • Processing power is 250 times normal PCs and workstations.
  • Speed is 4 tera-flops (executes 4 trillion floating point operation per one second).
  • Processors: 3 or 4 "Tesla C1060 GPU" each 1.29 GHz in clock speed.
  • Memory of each processor: 4GHz, speed: 800 MHz.
  • Supported operating systems include Windows XP, Red Hat and SUSE



The Tesla personal supercomputer seems to be designed for PC gaming, and highly computational research and professional work.
According to Nvidia: several institutes already uses a GPU based personal computer (ex the Max Planck Institute, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Cambridge University).
Last thing: its price, it is expected to reach $10,000 very cheap :D
For more information, http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_supercomputing.html

Friday, November 21, 2008

Prepare to run a "p-threaded" c project

here is a good quick reference to learning pthreads, but normal building and running won't work as the gcc must be explicitly directed to load the runtime library pthread upon running, for the line "#include " to work. How will we do it?

  1. From command line:
    Instead of normal compiling way:
    gcc sourc_file.c

    , you are supposed to use:
    gcc -lpthread sourc_file.c

    directing the linker to link the runtime library "pthread".


  2. Using eclipse IDE:
    It is fairly easy too, we will do the same something but from configuration of this project, steps:

    • Create a new project copy-paste any pthread-using code, (for example: use the above link)
    • Right click your project and select properties (alternatively hit alt+enter)
    • Expand C/C++, and click Settings, you should see something like:
    • Expand the GCC linker and click libraries, you should see something like:
    • At the text are "libraries (-l)", click add, as figured in the above snapshot.
    • Type the name of the run time library you want to add (in out case: "pthread") without the preceding "-l"
    • Now build and run your project .. enjoy pthreads