I am interested in High-performance computing exploration and research, comparison of algorithms and platforms and tools. Example applications are optimization algorithms are Monte Carlo Simulations of Lattice QCD.

There are several approaches you may take to increase your computing resources. The availability of broad-band Internet connections and the still increasing cost-performance ratio of computing hardware as well as the enormous computational potential of Internet-connected infrastructure have sparked an interest on dynamically configured computational grids available on as-needed bases. This is referred to as Cloud Computing. Cloud computing involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources offered as a service over the Internet. The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on how the Internet is depicted in computer network diagrams and is an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it conceals. Mayor players on Information Technology such as IBM, SUN, Microsoft, and Amazon have offerings of this kind. Some of them might be open to support research projects.  There are also non-commercial projects that have taken advantage of the Internet computing power in what is known as volunteer computing such as SETI@home.

One example of the volunteer computing paradigm is the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (http://www.mersenne.org/ ) which has been finding large primes since 1996. On April of 2009 a Mersenne prime, a 12,837,064 digit number, was found on a regular office workstation. This calculation took 29 days on a 3.0 GHz Intel Core2 processor. The basic idea here is to have a central server assigning tasks to a variable and unreliable computational pool, using idle resources that would be wasted otherwise.

A different approach is the one taken by Galaxy Zoo 2, an interactive project that allows the user to participate in a large-scale project classifying millions of galaxies.  Galaxy Zoo 2 is a new version of the highly successful project that enables members of the public to say whether a galaxy was spiral or elliptical, and which way it was rotating, Galaxy Zoo 2 asks users to delve deeper into 250,000 of the brightest and best galaxies to search for the strange and unusual. Here the project is asking people themselves to spend time looking and analyzing data.

A more general approach was a result of the two original goals of SETI@home project: to prove the viability and practicality of the ‘distributed grid computing’ concept, and to do useful scientific work by supporting an observational analysis to detect intelligent life outside Earth. The first of these goals is generally considered to have succeeded completely. The current BOINC environment, a development of the original SETI@home, is providing support for several computationally intensive projects in a wide range of disciplines.

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a non-commercial middleware system for volunteer and grid computing. It was originally developed to support the SETI@home project before it became useful as a platform for other distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics. The intent of BOINC is to make it possible for researchers to tap into the enormous processing power of personal computers around the world.  BOINC has been developed by a team based at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley led by David Anderson, who also leads SETI@home. As a “quasi-supercomputing” platform, BOINC has about 570,000 active computers (hosts) worldwide processing on average 2 petaFLOPS as of July 2009.

In another complementary vein there have been some efforts to leverage the availability of graphics-acceleration-hardware to use a low cost high performance platform.  General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, also referred to as GPGP and to a lesser extent GP²) is the technique of using a GPU, which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditionally handled by the CPU. It is made possible by the addition of programmable stages and higher precision arithmetic to the rendering pipelines, which allows software developers to use stream processing on non-graphics data.

1. Must burn more than you take in. The amount of calories you need depend on both your body characteristics and the things you do during the day. If you live on freezing weather you will need lots of calories just to keep warm, or if you are a high-performance athlete you need fuel to perform. So eat light and exercise a little unless you have specific reasons to do otherwise. You exercise routine does not need to be heavy but it must be steady and regular. Include stretching, start always with a warm up and end with a cool down appropriate to the intensity of what you do. With a little imagination you normal daily routine might be enough.
2. Have breakfast. A good breakfast is essential; you can perform better and be less hungry during the day. Lunch and supper should be light meals. To start the day with a good breakfast will put discipline and order in your life and a natural consequence will be an appropriate weight.
3. Eat balanced meals. The food you eat should provide all necessary nutrients without excess calories. Combine colors and textures and have generous portions of fruits and vegetables.
4. Drink lots of water. Drink water and unsweetened tea. Use tea as a snack. Don’t drink soft drinks or other sugar-loaded beverages.
5. Don’t buy junk. Do not buy junk food at all. If you have in the house, you will eat it.
6. Measure. Keep track of your weight and what you eat but do not overemphasize calorie counting. If you try always to eat a balanced meal and go light on the fats you should be alright. The key is not to overeat.
7. Have a hobby. Do not use food as time filler, do something with your life. Having a positive self image will help you control your weight and the overall quality of your life will improve. If you make food an issue it would be harder to control it. It’s best to put your energies and focus on something positive instead of try to offset negatives.

• Septuaginta (Greek Edition)
• Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint
• The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations
• Koine Greek Reader: Selections from the New Testament, Septuagint, and Early Christian Writers
• A Reader’s Greek New Testament: 2nd Edition
• Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar
• Greek New Testament: With English Introduction including Greek/English dictionary/flexible (Greek and English Edition)
• A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd Edition

from:

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/google_inc/google_book_search/index.html?inline=nyt-org

Judge Chin also echoed comments made by the Justice Department last week that the settlement, if properly revised, could offer great benefits, most notably, by providing broad access to to millions of out-of-print books that are largely locked up in a small group of university libraries.

“The settlement would offer many benefits to society, as recognized by supporters of the settlement as well as D.O.J.,” he wrote, referring to theDepartment of Justice, which filed its own brief in the case last week. “It would appear that if a fair and reasonable settlement can be struck, the public would benefit.”

Google Book Search is the ambitious plan to digitize every book – famous or not, in any language, published anywhere on earth – found in the world’s libraries, as part of the company’s core mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Beginning in 2002 as a “secret books project,” according to an official history at the Google site, Google Book Search has become a planned multibillion-dollar effort that has had to overcome many obstacles, both the sheer effort of scanning so many pages of text as well as conforming to copyright laws.

Google started in 2004 to team with many of the greatest library collections in the world — the New York Public Library, the University of Michigan, Harvard and Stanford, among others — to digitize their collections, paying the scanning costs. Google expects to scan 15 million books from those collections over the next decade.

In October 2008, Google reached a settlement with authors and publishers to end a class-action lawsuit that challenged the legality of the scanning project. Under the agreement, Google will pay $125 million and create the framework for a new system that will channel payments from book sales, advertising revenue and other fees to authors and publishers, with Google collecting a cut.

The $125 million will go to compensate authors and publishers whose books are still under copyright and help find the copyright holders for so-called “orphan works,” out-of-print books that are still within the law. These copyright holders, who are considered part of the group, or class, that settled with Google, are hard to find, since many never expected their works ever to be in print again. It is the resurrection of these works — making them available at the click of a mouse — that many consider among the greatest benefits of Google Book Search. That, and the millions of public domain works that will be easily searched and called up by computer users around world.

The proposed settlement has attracted opposition from various corners of the book world, and the Department of Justice has opened an antitrust investigation. Late on Sept. 18., 2009, the Justice Department said the proposed legal settlement between Google and book authors and publishers should not be approved by the court without modifications.

A sri-lankan (Michael Ondaatje)  living in Canada writes about an hungarian educated in Britain that lives by the words of a Greek in the North African desert

The English Patient

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_English_Patient

The Lost Oasis: The Desert War and the Hunt for Zerzura

With Rommel’s Army in Libya

Gilf Kebir

Herodotus: The Histories (Penguin Classics)

The Histories

John Newton (1725-1807)
Stanza 6 anon.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

T’was Grace that taught my heart to fear.
And Grace, my fears relieved.
How precious did that Grace appear
The hour I first believed.

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;
‘Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far
and Grace will lead me home.

The Lord has promised good to me.
His word my hope secures.
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.

Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease,
I shall possess within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.

When we’ve been here ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun.
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’ve first begun.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

There are more Irish in New York City than in Dublin, Ireland; more Italians in New York City than in Rome, Italy; and more Jews in New York City than in Tel Aviv, Israel. The term ‘The Big Apple’ was coined by touring jazz musicians of the 1930’s who used the slang expression ‘apple’ for any town or city. Therefore, to play New York City is to play the big time – The Big Apple.

Next to Warsaw, Chicago has the largest Polish population in the world.

Antarctica is the only land on our planet that is not owned by any country.

Ninety percent of the world’s ice covers Antarctica . This ice also represents  seventy  percent of all the fresh water in the world. As strange as  it sounds, however, Antarctica is essentially a desert. The average  yearly total precipitation is about two inches Although covered with ice  (all but 0.4% of it, ice.), Antarctica is the driest place on the  planet, with an absolute humidity lower than the Gobi  desert.

In the Sahara Desert there is a town named Tidikelt, Algeria, which did not receive a drop of rain for ten years. Technically though, the driest place on Earth is in the valleys of the Antarctic, near Ross Island. There has been no rainfall there for two million years.

The  Amazon rainforest produces more than 20% the world’s oxygen  supply.

The  Amazon River pushes so much water into the Atlantic Ocean that, more  than one hundred miles at sea off the mouth of the river, one can dip  fresh water out of the ocean.  The volume of water in the Amazon  river is greater than the next eight largest rivers in the world  combined and three times the flow of all rivers in the United  States.