838 lines
47 KiB
HTML
838 lines
47 KiB
HTML
<!--startcut ==============================================-->
|
|
<!-- *** BEGIN HTML header *** -->
|
|
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
|
|
<HTML><HEAD>
|
|
<title>Super Computing 2000 LG #60</title>
|
|
</HEAD>
|
|
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#000000" LINK="#0000FF" VLINK="#0000AF"
|
|
ALINK="#FF0000">
|
|
<!-- *** END HTML header *** -->
|
|
|
|
<CENTER>
|
|
<A HREF="http://www.linuxgazette.com/">
|
|
<H1><IMG ALT="LINUX GAZETTE" SRC="../gx/lglogo.jpg"
|
|
WIDTH="600" HEIGHT="124" border="0"></H1></A>
|
|
|
|
<!-- *** BEGIN navbar *** -->
|
|
<IMG ALT="" SRC="../gx/navbar/left.jpg" WIDTH="14" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom"><A HREF="lg_tips60.html"><IMG ALT="[ Prev ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/prev.jpg" WIDTH="16" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom"></A><A HREF="index.html"><IMG ALT="[ Table of Contents ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/toc.jpg" WIDTH="220" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom" ></A><A HREF="../index.html"><IMG ALT="[ Front Page ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/frontpage.jpg" WIDTH="137" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom"></A><A HREF="http://www.linuxgazette.com/cgi-bin/talkback/all.py?site=LG&article=http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue60/adler.html"><IMG ALT="[ Talkback ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/talkback.jpg" WIDTH="121" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom" ></A><A HREF="../faq/index.html"><IMG ALT="[ FAQ ]" SRC="./../gx/navbar/faq.jpg"WIDTH="62" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom"></A><A HREF="andreiana.html"><IMG ALT="[ Next ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/next.jpg" WIDTH="15" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom" ></A><IMG ALT="" SRC="../gx/navbar/right.jpg" WIDTH="15" HEIGHT="45" ALIGN="bottom">
|
|
<!-- *** END navbar *** -->
|
|
<P>
|
|
</CENTER>
|
|
|
|
<!--endcut ============================================================-->
|
|
|
|
<H4 ALIGN="center">
|
|
"Linux Gazette...<I>making Linux just a little more fun!</I>"
|
|
</H4>
|
|
|
|
<P> <HR> <P>
|
|
<!--===================================================================-->
|
|
|
|
<center>
|
|
<H1><font color="maroon">SC2KYASCC:<BR>Super Computing 2000<BR>
|
|
Yet Another Super-Computing Conference</font></H1>
|
|
<H4>By <a href="mailto:adler@ssadler.phy.bnl.gov">Stephen Adler</a></H4>
|
|
</center>
|
|
<font size=-1>
|
|
I just love long stupid acronyms... -SA
|
|
</font>
|
|
<P> <HR> <P>
|
|
|
|
<!-- END header -->
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
<img src=misc/adler/showfloorCrop.jpg>
|
|
<BR CLEAR="all">
|
|
<P>
|
|
<H4>Off-site links:</H4>
|
|
<UL>
|
|
<LI> <a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/sc2kpg0.html">
|
|
photo gallary</a> (25.5 MB of inline images on 6 pages)
|
|
<LI> <a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/sc2k.html">
|
|
original article (has additional pictures)</a> (5.06 MB of inline images
|
|
on one page)
|
|
</UL>
|
|
|
|
<H2>The conference</H2>
|
|
There is a strange background roar which permeates airplanes when they
|
|
are in full flight. That's the roar which I hear, and feel, right
|
|
now. I'm on American flight 736, on my way back to LaGuardia, from
|
|
Dallas, where <a href="http://www.sc2000.org">Super Computing 2000</a>
|
|
just finished. It's been over a year since I last wrote up a
|
|
conference, talk or composed an editorial for the Internet, largely
|
|
because I've been really busy with my day job at Brookhaven Lab. The
|
|
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (or RHIC, see <a
|
|
href="http://www.phenix.bnl.gov">www.phenix.bnl.gov</a>) came on line
|
|
over the summer and that basically meant 80 hour weeks starting this
|
|
past February. After our first collisions were recorded and a long
|
|
summer of data taking, I got rather burnt out. Well, I think I've
|
|
recovered now... and after attending Super Computing 2000, I hope to
|
|
be able to get something written up about it. At least the next 3
|
|
hours I'll spend on this airplane will give me a chance to get
|
|
started.
|
|
<p>
|
|
I attended last years Super Computing conference in Portland Oregon,
|
|
(Nader country), which was quite delightful. The bit which I liked
|
|
most was the presence of industry, academia and the national labs,
|
|
all showing off what kind of super computing they are selling or what
|
|
they are doing with their super computer toys. Both the technical
|
|
sessions and the show floor were entertaining in the content they
|
|
presented. This was pretty much the same with this years conference.
|
|
Unfortunately, there was some overlap from what I saw last year with this
|
|
year so the, "Wow, this is soooo coool" feeling wasn't quite there, as it
|
|
was last year. Be that as it may, there was some cool stuff which
|
|
I want to pass on to those of you who don't have the money, time or
|
|
both to get yourselves down to Dallas to attend the conference. (The
|
|
conference fee is $700, which is quite on the steep side for the kind
|
|
of conferences I attend. Although you end up paying at least twice to
|
|
go to the full COMDEX conference and you get about a 10 times more
|
|
information out of the Super Computing conference then you get out of
|
|
the more main stream COMDEX shows.)
|
|
<p>
|
|
The show lasted 4 days, and I don't want to give you a full detailed
|
|
account of what I saw, you'll quickly be off surfing to other sites
|
|
if I did. What I'll do is focus on what I considered to be the highlights
|
|
of the conference. And as you all now, I'm a bit of a
|
|
Linux/Open Source/Free Software enthusiast, (Maybe I should rephrase that
|
|
"Free Software/Open Source/Linux enthusiast (FSOSLE)", to give proper
|
|
credit to Richard Stallman) and thus I'll tend to concentrate on those
|
|
topics.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<table align=left vspace=5 hspace=20>
|
|
<caption align=bottom><font face="arial,helvetica" size=-1>
|
|
Linux was everywhere. These guys had a nice stuffed Tux keeping an eye
|
|
on things.
|
|
</font></caption>
|
|
<tr><td>
|
|
<img src=misc/adler/tuxonfloor1Crop.jpg>
|
|
</tr></table>
|
|
First of all, the bit which I find most exciting was that Linux showed
|
|
a major presence at the show. This is a direct fallout of Donald
|
|
Becker's work on the Beowulf clustering software he and others helped
|
|
create. Super Computers on the cheap was quite pervasive and most of
|
|
the major computer vendors had some kind of Linux box or other. These
|
|
include SGI, IBM, Compaq, and a boat load of smaller
|
|
vendors. Noticeably absent was VA Linux, although there was at least
|
|
one rack of VA Linux PC's on the show floor. There were several Open
|
|
Source oriented talks as well. Most notably was Dr. Sterling's lecture
|
|
on COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) super computers, (I believe he's
|
|
Donald Becker's professor who seems to be the guy to give the COTS
|
|
Super Computer talks,) and the Open Source panel discussion which
|
|
occurred on the last day of the meeting. More on that later. It was
|
|
really neat to walk up and down the show floor and see all the stuffed
|
|
penguin dolls siting on top of booths, nestled between racks of 1U 1GHz
|
|
AMD PC's, and all the GNOME and KDE desktops which adorned many flat
|
|
panel LCD consoles at the conference. One notable exception was Sun. No
|
|
Linux there. I looked around their booth but didn't find any. But I
|
|
did find some console displays boasting a nice movie animation of
|
|
F14's or something of that sort. The application used to display the
|
|
movie was Xanim though. This wasn't the conference for them to be
|
|
showing off Star Office, so I didn't bother trying to get one of the
|
|
Sun guys to demo it.
|
|
<br clear=left>
|
|
<p>
|
|
The opening day of the conference was Tuesday, Nov 7th. Yup, voting
|
|
day. The key note speaker was Steven Wallach, the guy who helped
|
|
design the Data General 32-bit Eclipse MV superminicomputer, and is
|
|
now with Center Point venture capital firm. His talk was titled
|
|
"Petaflops in the Year 2009" and dealt with how he would envision the
|
|
Petaflop computers of the future. The main point of his talk was that
|
|
the basic core of the future Petaflop computer is being built right
|
|
now to service the backbone of the Internet. I must say, Steve Wallach
|
|
did convince me of his arguments. The basic problem right now is that
|
|
the chip manufactures or CPU designers or whatever you call these
|
|
folk, are starting to reach physical boundaries imposed by Mother
|
|
Nature and her laws of physics which govern our universe. Moore's law
|
|
only goes so far and there is a barrier which is the speed of
|
|
light. It could be that some time in the future, one will be able to
|
|
use takions in some kind of semiconductor to operate transistors which
|
|
effectively switch faster than the seed of light, (Think about it,
|
|
with one of them in your PC, when you surf the Internet, you just
|
|
don't click from one hyper link to the next, you get to surf through
|
|
space-time. Click here to go to a chat room 2 days from now... Click
|
|
here to see the price of your stock 10 minutes from now...) Because of
|
|
these limitations, the bottle necks which are forming are the ones
|
|
which limit the speed at which you can get data into and out of your
|
|
CPU. This is where the work being done by Lucent and others comes into
|
|
play. Lucent is trying to get terabytes of data per second through a
|
|
routing node. One has to do this by being able to guide the different
|
|
wavelengths of light from one input port on the router to an output
|
|
port on the router without slowing down the data rate. This
|
|
architecture of data in, data out and very high speeds is basically
|
|
the inner core of the processor design needed for future super
|
|
computer systems. Remember, super computer systems will never be made
|
|
up of one big, really fast CPU. They will be made up of many small
|
|
nodes, interconnected through some kind of data mesh. Therefore Steve
|
|
Wallach emphasizes that in order to break the last bottle neck in
|
|
current CPU designs, one needs to push the data around between CPU's
|
|
optically and not try to push it in and out electrically. The guys
|
|
building the backbone of the Internet are doing this, and thus the
|
|
guys building the next generation CPU's should be talking to the guys
|
|
over at Lucent. By the way, Steve mumbled something about how Linux
|
|
would be running on this Petaflop computer. Look for the announcement
|
|
on Slashdot sometime in the year 2009....
|
|
<br clear=right>
|
|
<p>
|
|
The next session after the keynote which I attended was the "Who
|
|
wants to be a Billionaire" panel discussion. That's a stupid question,
|
|
of course I want to be a billionaire. The panel discussion was headed
|
|
up by the same guy who gave the key note, Steve Wallach. There were
|
|
three guys on the panel. They were Scott Grout of Chorum, Matt Blanton
|
|
of Startech and Jackie Kimzey of Sevin Rosen Funds. Scott Grout
|
|
read his introductory comments and didn't say much else. Basically, he
|
|
worked for some telecommunications company which went through the
|
|
venture capital funding round and got itself established. Matt Blanton
|
|
and Jackie Kimzey gave their remarks which again, I can't quite
|
|
remember the details of. I'm too lazy to check my notes right now.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<table align=left vspace=5 hspace=20>
|
|
<caption align=bottom><font face="arial,helvetica" size=-1>
|
|
Photographed above is Steve Wallach, the Convex Computer guy, who also
|
|
gave the key note address for SC2000. His day job is to review the
|
|
project you submitted to <a href="http://www.centerpointvp.com">
|
|
Center Point Ventures</a>, grill you on it and
|
|
watch you sweat.
|
|
</font></caption>
|
|
<tr><td>
|
|
<img src=misc/adler/billion1Crop.jpg>
|
|
</tr></table>
|
|
The bit which I want to impress upon you is the venture capital feeling
|
|
I got from the panel discussion. This feeling is a bit hard to
|
|
describe, but I'm going to give it a try. The talk started off
|
|
basically with a bunch of comments from Steve and his panel. They
|
|
wanted to get across to the audience what the venture capital process
|
|
is all about. "I got this great idea you see, and I want to run with
|
|
it. What do I do?" is the question they were trying to answer. Their
|
|
answer was something like this. Write up your idea, get in touch with
|
|
your local incubator, get a prototype going, then go to your local VC,
|
|
show off your prototype to him, he'll give you money, and off you go,
|
|
onto your IPO. After you IPO, you build up your product a bit more,
|
|
and finally you get bought out by a major company like Microsoft, Red
|
|
Hat or Cicso. (They never mentioned Red Hat, but hey, they have been
|
|
going around buying up companies right and left...). I was sitting there
|
|
just absorbing this information, typing into my laptop as much of this
|
|
as I could. (Yes, I really do want to be a billionaire). Then it
|
|
started to hit me. These guys are the real thing. Jackie Kimzey of
|
|
Sevin Rosen Funds has just raised 850 Million bucks of venture capital
|
|
to fund companies which could be the next Yahoo or AOL. And they
|
|
have to spend all that money. The investors didn't give him the money
|
|
so that he could buy 30 year bonds with it. These guy's kept talking
|
|
about the 16th floor. It dawned on me that the "16th floor" is a floor
|
|
in some high rise building down town where the Dallas high
|
|
tech VC boys hang out. Steve Wallach and Jackie Kimzey being two of these high
|
|
tech VC boys. (Actually, Steve Wallach is from Brooklyn and his accent
|
|
doesn't quite fit in with the Texas good ol' boy drawl, but you get my
|
|
point...) And as all things Texas, they got Dollars (yup, capital D
|
|
Dollars, as in capital D Dallas) to spend (ehhmmm I meant to say
|
|
invest...) Jackie said flat out, don't bother to cold call them. "We
|
|
prefer referrals, like from our pal Matt of Startech". They review
|
|
hundreds of proposals which I'm sure end up in the trash. And if you are
|
|
lucky enough to be considered for 1st round funding, you are rewarded
|
|
with a review of your proposal. In other words, get ready to be
|
|
grilled by the boys on the 16th floor. I'm sure they grill you and if they
|
|
don't see you sweat, they'll grill you even harder. I think that VC
|
|
feeling hit me when Steve Wallach said something to the effect that
|
|
they hire Nobel Laureates to come in and review your proposal. That
|
|
coupled to 850 million dollars ready to invest made me realize that
|
|
these guys mean business. They kept saying this throughout the
|
|
presentation. It just took some time for me to really get a feeling
|
|
for what they were saying. "Look, don't put a management team together
|
|
made up of your cousin the accountant as the CFO, your best friend
|
|
the hacker as the CTO etc." said Steve W. The first thing we look at
|
|
is the quality of your team. "We want to make you rich, and in doing
|
|
so we will make ourselves rich." This was another Steve Wallach
|
|
statement. This is business, high tech, high stakes business, sort of like
|
|
a really bad poker game, with 850 Million in the pot. Every hand is
|
|
taken seriously. Think big swinging d.ck as in the boys from Goldman
|
|
Sachs.
|
|
<p>
|
|
This concept is so foreign to government research. At least in the
|
|
government laboratory environment which I work in. Our time is
|
|
basically worthless and is seldom taken into account when we work on
|
|
projects. A statement like "the quality of your team" rings rather
|
|
hollow around here. I think we, as scientists, tend to devalue our
|
|
time, because of the tight job market for positions where one can
|
|
freely do research with particle colliders. Thus you put up with the
|
|
fact that you, Dr. so and so, who just received her Ph.D. in High
|
|
Energy Physics, has to break out the RJ45 clamp and start cutting CAT-5
|
|
cable so that she can wire up the crate controllers for her
|
|
experiment. That along with having to install and maintain her Linux
|
|
cluster so that she can store and analyze her data. And forget that
|
|
trip to XYZ conference, overtime has to be paid to the electricians
|
|
because if not, her experiment wouldn't be ready on day one when the
|
|
accelerator turns on and delivers her beam. And believe me, the
|
|
unionized electricians only work on her experiment if she pays
|
|
overtime. And then comes the kicker. "Sorry, you spent too much time
|
|
developing software and hardware and not enough time doing
|
|
science. Look at your publication record, it stinks! No tenure for
|
|
you. Go find a job somewhere else...." Don't think I'm kidding, this
|
|
is why its so hard to attract new talent into High Energy and Nuclear
|
|
physics.
|
|
<p>
|
|
Then we have the other side of the spectrum, the VC side. Some
|
|
president of some start-up at this panel discussion, got up and
|
|
recounted an anecdote regarding a board meeting he attend. He told
|
|
the board that he managed to save 300,000 bucks or so because he was
|
|
able to postpone hiring some people. He was expecting some
|
|
congratulatory remarks and instead he was scolded. "You have a plan to
|
|
execute, therefore spend the $300K and execute the plan!" he was told.
|
|
What I got away from this panel discussion is that when serious money
|
|
is on the line, (850 Million bucks is serious money) you don't f..k
|
|
around. You make sure the plan is right, hire the best of the best
|
|
to verify this, (i.e. hire Nobel laureates to review your circuit
|
|
design and software flow charts) and make sure the guys to which you
|
|
are giving the money, can stand up to a brutal review. If they can't,
|
|
the VC's will be throwing their money away on that proposal. The
|
|
upside of all this is that if you do get your 1st round of funding,
|
|
then they will be with you to make sure your plan goes right. And,
|
|
don't expect to retain full ownership of your company, their
|
|
commission is measured as a percentage ownership of the company you
|
|
are building. If you don't like it, go down to your local savings and
|
|
loan and pitch your idea to them, these VC's have another 300 business
|
|
plans to choose from. You know, this may sound crazy, but after what
|
|
I've been put through working for the government, I would give my left
|
|
nut to work in that kind of environment....
|
|
<p>
|
|
<table align=right vspace=5 hspace=20>
|
|
<caption align=bottom><font face="arial,helvetica" size=-1>
|
|
Dr. Monty Denneau of IBM. He's helping design IBM's Petaflopper called
|
|
Blue Gene. And yes, he did so standing right there with no visual
|
|
aids. He just stood there and talked about out it for 45 minutes. No
|
|
notes, no power point, no nut'in...
|
|
</font></caption>
|
|
<tr><td>
|
|
<img src=misc/adler/bluegeneCrop.jpg>
|
|
</tr></table>
|
|
The next talk worth mentioning was given by Monty Denneau of IBM on
|
|
their <a href="http://www.research.ibm.com/news/detail/bluegene.html">
|
|
Blue Gene</a> machine. Blue Gene is IBM's next Petaflop computer. Its cost?
|
|
Monty gave the figure of $100 Million bucks. "All big IBM computers cost
|
|
$100 million." It's sort of the canonical cost for the next generation
|
|
computer IBM builds. There are a few key concepts of Blue Gene which I
|
|
picked up on.
|
|
<p>
|
|
First of all, the Blue Gene research team started out by
|
|
designing a RISC instruction set from scratch. They wanted to use something
|
|
like the PPC but its instruction set just got too large. This was due
|
|
to too many people coming and going from the PPC design team and all
|
|
instructions had to be kept in order to keep backward
|
|
compatibility. Thus the "typical" RISC architecture had 250 to 300
|
|
instructions of which only 50 were really used and some were never
|
|
used. There were even other instructions, that if used, would break
|
|
the performance of the chip, and so the instruction had to be turned
|
|
off by the compiler. After that explanation, it was clear to me that
|
|
it was a good idea to start the CPU design by tossing out the
|
|
instruction set and starting from scratch.
|
|
<p>
|
|
The next key concept was to build many small CPU's on one fabrication
|
|
die. The idea being that one "CPU chip" would have hundreds of CPU's,
|
|
with floating point units scattered throughout the die along with
|
|
secondary cache units. Coupled with this idea was the concept that if
|
|
one of the CPU's didn't work, the OS would detect this and not use
|
|
it. Therefore, if you have a large die or silicon from which you're
|
|
going to build your "processor chip", a defect in the fabrication in
|
|
the sequencer unit or instruction set memory or whatever would not
|
|
cause you to throw out the chip. This is a big problem with today's
|
|
current CPU manufacturing. 100 microns of bad silicon in the wrong
|
|
spot and you had to throw out the CPU. Monty couldn't give exact
|
|
figures, but he said that because of this ability of having the OS
|
|
turn off just the bad CPUs then the production yields went from very
|
|
low to very high. This is very much the same concept as bad blocks on a
|
|
hard disk drive.
|
|
<br clear=left>
|
|
<p>
|
|
The next concept was that of a water cooled system. The amount of air
|
|
flow needed to cool a Petaflop machine would require a couple of jet
|
|
turbo engines providing hurricane equivalent wind forces. Therefore,
|
|
one had to resort to using water to cool the system. As it turns out,
|
|
there was great resistance to this idea, but Monty prevailed.
|
|
<p>
|
|
The final idea which I remember was how they were going to connect this
|
|
Petaflop machine together. The idea was to build cubes of processors
|
|
and then connect the cubes together with some kind of cabling. The
|
|
problem being that there was a lot of cable to hook up and it needed
|
|
to be done right. <a href="http://www.osha.gov">OSHA</a> got in the way
|
|
because if you build something which humans must traverse, like a
|
|
hallway, or a conduit under IBM's Blue Gene, you needed to provide
|
|
space for a guy, 7 feet tall, to be able to run out of in case there is
|
|
a fire. No getting around this requirement. So they built Blue Gene
|
|
over a special floor which was broken up into a grid. Each grid
|
|
element could be raised and lowered. So you have to imagine this. A
|
|
large floor area where you see hundreds of CPU cubes. The operator
|
|
has to check the connector on one of the CPU cubes. He goes and
|
|
clicks on some Java thing or other on his console and grid point XY
|
|
raises up to arm level. He then goes out there, checks the cable, and
|
|
when done, goes back and clicks on his Java interface and the cpu cube
|
|
is lowered back into the grid. Definitely Space Odyssey 2001 stuff.
|
|
<p>
|
|
I believe IBM is on the right track. With this design, they will get
|
|
their Petaflop computer, at about $100 Million, give or take a factor
|
|
of 2 or 3. But what really impressed me about Monty's talk is that he
|
|
didn't bother to prepare a power point presentation like the rest of
|
|
the speakers did. He just got out there in front of the audience and
|
|
started talking away. I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing, but
|
|
impressive in the least. Sort of like watching a no hitter.
|
|
<p>
|
|
The speaker after Monty was Keiji Tani speaking about the 40Teraflop
|
|
machine which Japan is building. The bit which struck me about his
|
|
talk was that for about $500 Million bucks, Japan is building a 40
|
|
Teraflopper which will be housed in a building the size of a large
|
|
basketball stadium and will have about 20,000 Kilometers of
|
|
cabling. The speaker before him described a petaflopper which will be
|
|
housed in a large auditorium for about $100 million bucks. The two
|
|
will be ready in about 2 or 3 years. You do the math, but if I were
|
|
reviewing the Japanese project, it would be hard for me to justify
|
|
the cost..... My guess is that the Japanese need to build this
|
|
machine to show the rest of the world that they are players in the HPC
|
|
game. Just like the US spends hundreds of millions on their Giga and
|
|
Tera floppers in the national labs scattered about the country. Forget
|
|
about what's housed in the NSA research labs.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<table align=left vspace=5 hspace=20>
|
|
<caption align=bottom><font face="arial,helvetica" size=-1>
|
|
Dr. David Anderson is pictured above, who is the director of the
|
|
seti@home project. He was able to harvest 20 Teraflops of computing
|
|
power from the Internet to help analyze SETI data recorded at
|
|
Arecibo for about $800K. Now that's creativity.
|
|
</font></caption>
|
|
<tr><td>
|
|
<img src=misc/adler/setiCrop.jpg>
|
|
</tr></table>
|
|
The next speaker worth mentioning was David Anderson, the director of
|
|
the seti@home project. (You can view photos of his presentation
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/setiathome.html">here</a>.)
|
|
I'm a real fan of this project
|
|
because it shows what can be done with creativity. Actually, one can
|
|
argue that if it wasn't for the financial constraints which the
|
|
project underwent, the seti@home concept wouldn't have been
|
|
created. Necessity is the mother of invention is the rule which can be
|
|
seen at work in this project. Basically David gave an overview of the
|
|
SETI project. SETI funding dried up in 1993. In order to continue
|
|
their research efforts they required two things. One was to find a way
|
|
to keep taking data and the other was to find the computing resources
|
|
to find the SETI signal in the data they collected. This is a compute
|
|
intensive task if there ever was one. The first job, that of recording
|
|
data was solved by becoming a parasitic experiment at
|
|
<a href="http://www.naic.edu/">Arecibo</a>, the radio telescope in Puerto
|
|
Rico. The way they did this is the following.
|
|
<br clear=left>
|
|
<p>
|
|
The telescope is basically fixed, and the ability to point it, is
|
|
restricted to the positioning of the receiver which sits above the
|
|
dish of the observatory, and the sweeping of space as the earth
|
|
turns. Therefore there is a rather elaborate mechanism to move around
|
|
the receiver above the dish which gives Arecibo its pointing
|
|
ability. In order to make this movement of the receiver work, there is
|
|
a counter balance which is needed to stabilize the main receiver. So
|
|
the SETI people were able to install a second receiver on the counter
|
|
balance. This made them the parasitic experiment. Those researchers
|
|
who paid for prime time on the facility got to point the telescope in
|
|
what ever direction they wished, the SETI people would then pick up
|
|
what ever signal they could get from where ever their secondary
|
|
receiver ended up pointing. Sort of like if the guys paying for time
|
|
on the observatory were looking left, SETI was forced to look
|
|
right. In the end, this situation worked out OK for them. The SETI
|
|
researches were able to scan the sky in a random walk, determined by
|
|
the other experiments running at the time. David explained that they
|
|
effectively covered the sky in about 6 months time.
|
|
<p>
|
|
With that they solved their data collection
|
|
problem. Next they needed to solve their number crunching problem and
|
|
with that they thought up of the seti@home project. What really
|
|
surprised them was the willingness of people to donate their idle
|
|
computer time to the project. They were hoping for about 100k people
|
|
to help out. When they posted their announcement to the Internet, they
|
|
got over 400K people signing up to their mailing list. When they went
|
|
online for the first time, they got over 200K users requesting data to
|
|
be analyzed. They were so overwhelmed by the system overload by
|
|
having 200K users requesting data to analyze, that it took them 8
|
|
months to e-mail out an announcement to the original 400K who signed up
|
|
to their e-mail list. Basically they were totally swamped and had to
|
|
work very hard to deal with their success. David talked a bit about the
|
|
setup of their system which reminded me of the many data acquisition
|
|
talks I've given and heard. One of the interesting details of the
|
|
seti@home project I found was that they got a lot of funding from
|
|
private, non-science institutions like Paramount Pictures. If I
|
|
remember correctly, of the $700K they got in funding $200K was from
|
|
these private sources. Paramount was interested in this project
|
|
because they wanted to get Captain Picard to throw some big power
|
|
switch which would start the whole experiment. That never happened,
|
|
but the check did clear. Sun Microsystems donated lots of hardware.
|
|
David was very grateful of this contribution and spent some time
|
|
plugging them.
|
|
<br clear=left>
|
|
<p>
|
|
They had problems with making sure the data which was returned was
|
|
actually processed by their client code. Since seti@home has been made
|
|
a bit of a game with respect to processing the data, a lot of people
|
|
have faked results so that they can climb up the "who has analyzed the
|
|
most data" ladder. He also spoke about the Open Source controversy. As
|
|
it turned out, there were some people "out there" in the Open Source
|
|
community which were very angry that the client code was not Open
|
|
Source'ed. At some point, there were some web sites which wanted to
|
|
boycott the project because of this and others wanted to launch some
|
|
kind of attack against the server unless they open source'ed their
|
|
client code. I was quite ashamed to hear this. He went on to talk
|
|
about how some users were also angry that the client code was not
|
|
optimized for their particular hardware which the code was running
|
|
on. For example, AMD CPU's have some instruction sets which will help
|
|
speed up FFTs as does the Intel Pentiums with the MMX instructions. In
|
|
order to make the code portable, the seti@home guys didn't pay much
|
|
attention to these issues. So there were some users out there which
|
|
disassembled the client code, found the portions which did the FFT and
|
|
they replaced that section of the code with their own optimized FFT
|
|
routines, optimized for their particular CPU instruction set. Now that
|
|
is hacking. After the talk, I asked David if he realized that if he
|
|
open sourced his client code, then people would have provided the
|
|
optimization code for him instead of forcing the users disassemble the
|
|
code. He told me that he worried about the integrity of the code and
|
|
that he couldn't trust the scientific code put into the client. I
|
|
understood where he was coming from. If I were to do something
|
|
similar, start a phenix@home project, then I would have to provide a
|
|
way of verifying the results of the computations every time someone
|
|
added in some code. This verification process could break the @home
|
|
usefulness of the project. Also, you would have to somehow guarantee
|
|
that the code, once complied, was really that same code and not some
|
|
rogue client which someone put together in order to fake fast data
|
|
processing time. As it stands now, seti@home has accumulated about
|
|
450,000 years of computing time or an instantaneous computing rate of
|
|
20 Teraflops. This is half the size of the computer the Japanese are
|
|
building which essentially cost the SETI research team $40K/Teraflop
|
|
instead of $12,500K/Teraflop for which the Japanese can build HPC
|
|
systems. Also, half of the data out of the Berkeley domain belongs to
|
|
the seti@home project. That's a cool factoid.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<center>
|
|
<table>
|
|
<caption align=bottom><font face="arial,helvetica" size=-1>
|
|
The left side of the Open Source panel discussion. Todd Needham from
|
|
Microsoft is on the left, Susan Grahm of UC Berkeley is next to him,
|
|
and Jose Munoz, my DOE buddy, is next to Susan looking to his
|
|
left. The guy behind the podium is Robert Brochers of NSF. The guy
|
|
from Sandia National Lab is not shown.
|
|
</font></caption>
|
|
<tr><td>
|
|
<img src=misc/adler/ospanel1Crop.jpg>
|
|
</tr></table>
|
|
</center>
|
|
<p>
|
|
The final session I want to cover is the open source panel discussion
|
|
which took place at the very end of the conference. The topic being,
|
|
how can the high performance computing (HPC) field take advantage of
|
|
the open source movement and how should the government funding agencies
|
|
deal with this matter. As it turns out, there is a committee out there
|
|
titled the "President's Information Technology Advisory Committee",
|
|
or PITAC, and they were charged with investigating the matter for the
|
|
HPC field. The result was the publication of a document titled
|
|
<a href="http://www.itrd.gov/ac/#pres-11sep00">
|
|
"Developing Open source Software to Advance High End Computing"</a>.
|
|
The members of the PITAC who worked on this report were present on the
|
|
panel. The first panel member, Susan Graham of UC Berkeley, basically
|
|
gave a report on the report. The short side of it was that they
|
|
recognized the potential of open source software and that the
|
|
government should take advantage of it and do so now. The government
|
|
should not take its time on this issue. The next panelist to speak was
|
|
Todd Needham from Microsoft. This was unique to me, the first time I
|
|
get to hear a bona fide Microsofter speak about open source
|
|
software. His general attitude was that Open Source was not pixie dust
|
|
which you could sprinkle over software and suddenly make it all that
|
|
more powerful. Which is to say that in general, he was rather negative
|
|
toward the movement. He had a rather angry and defensive attitude
|
|
throughout the panel discussion which put me off. I guess it's the
|
|
fallout of the antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.
|
|
<p>
|
|
From my notes I was able to get the following from his
|
|
introduction. He argued that Open Source is not a development
|
|
methodology. In fact, he claimed that many projects are more cathedral
|
|
than bazaar. (He gave the Linux kernel development as an example, with
|
|
Linus sitting at the top.) He claimed that it is not a security
|
|
model. Many eyeballs are not a replacement for a formal design and
|
|
review process. (It's interesting to hear that coming from a guy who
|
|
works for a company who just had a major break-in which made headlines
|
|
around the world...) Open Source does not mean open standards. He also
|
|
emphasized that open source license does not mean that you don't have
|
|
access to the source code. He did like the idea of managed source
|
|
code.
|
|
<br>
|
|
<font size=-1>
|
|
Note: You can find Todd's full presentation in
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/needham.pdf">this .pdf file</a>.
|
|
</font>
|
|
<p>
|
|
In one of his transparencies he alluded to open source as a way
|
|
of giving away your intellectual property rights and thus diluting the
|
|
monetary value of your work. After the introductory talks, there was a
|
|
question regarding this and he was quite adamant about how bad it was
|
|
to open source your code and thus lose the dollar value you put into
|
|
the code. He stated that Microsoft is a company which makes its money
|
|
off of intellectual property and thus the open source model just doesn't
|
|
work for them. (If Todd said otherwise, it would be a Slashdot
|
|
headline for sure....) It must have been interesting to see how the
|
|
report got out, which recommended the use and adoption of open source
|
|
software with Todd from Microsoft as one of the committee members.
|
|
<p>
|
|
The next guy who talked was Jose Munoz from DOE. He did a Dave
|
|
Letterman by going through the top 10 reason why Open Source software
|
|
is bad in reverse order. The last one being, or rather item #1, the
|
|
question "Would you want to fly in an airplane whose complete flight
|
|
system was developed using Open Source by the lowest bidder?",
|
|
followed by a bullet reading "Whom do you sue when the thing goes
|
|
wrong? (assuming you're a survivor)". It's unfortunate that the guy
|
|
who works for the same government agency which provides my paycheck
|
|
gave such a negative perspective to this issue. It was good to listen
|
|
to one of the members of the audience make a statement, at the end of
|
|
the session, that if given a choice between the plane running open
|
|
source software or something running under a Microsoft OS, he would
|
|
much prefer the open source one, given the track record of Microsoft
|
|
software. There were a couple of chuckles in the audience and a
|
|
blushed smile from Todd of Microsoft.
|
|
<br>
|
|
<font size=-1>Note: You can find Jose Munoz's full presentation in
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/munoz.pdf">this .pdf file</a>.
|
|
</font>
|
|
<br clear=left>
|
|
<p>
|
|
The last panelist to speak was from Sandia National Laboratories. His
|
|
talk was basically in favor of the Open Source software license model.
|
|
I asked two questions of the panelists, first I pointed out to them
|
|
that the Linux and the Linux distributions have fostered a new
|
|
generation of companies selling super computers. I told them that if
|
|
you walk around the show floor, you see many small companies selling
|
|
racks of Linux machines. I personally didn't see any companies selling
|
|
racks of Windows NT/2000 machines. They responded that the big
|
|
companies would sell you a rack of either a Linux or windows NT PC and
|
|
that there was one demonstration booth which had a rack of windows NT
|
|
PC's running Beowulf applications. Personally I believe they missed
|
|
the point I was trying to make, which was that Linux was fostering a
|
|
new industry made up of young start-ups. The second question that I asked
|
|
them, it was actually more of a statement than a question, was that
|
|
they should consider the Internet when they discuss issues relating to
|
|
open source. "Who owns the Internet? The Internet wouldn't exist if
|
|
it were owned by anyone." I remember a smile coming across Susan
|
|
Graham from Berkeley once I finished my statement. Todd from Microsoft
|
|
decided to answer my question. What I remember of his answer was that
|
|
he though AOL did a "damn good job" of hiding all that stuff from the
|
|
user in creating the front end which their user community uses.
|
|
Again, I believe he missed my point. To me, AOL was useless until they
|
|
connected themselves to the Internet. First by providing e-mail and
|
|
then when they provided you with a ppp connection.
|
|
<p>
|
|
My "consider the Internet" statement was the last one given before the
|
|
panel discussion ended. Of course I could have gone on a rant about my
|
|
"consider the Internet" statement and kept the panel going for at least
|
|
another 15 minutes by addressing some of the comments the panelists
|
|
said, but it was the end of 4 days of conferencing and I had to catch
|
|
my plane back to New York. Besides, no one wants to hear someone rant
|
|
on and on and turn a discussion personal. Who knows, I can write up a
|
|
rant, post that on my web site, and get many orders of magnitude more
|
|
people to read my rant than the few dozen which were in the conference
|
|
session at the time....
|
|
<p>
|
|
There were many many more talks and events which happened at the
|
|
conference, but it would take much to much time to write about the
|
|
whole thing. I tried to touch upon the items which I thought were the
|
|
most important. Other talks which were of interest were Dr. Sterlins
|
|
talk on Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) super computers, Eugene
|
|
Spafford's talk on security issues on the Internet, and all the stuff
|
|
which I saw on the show floor. That's left as a page full of
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/sc2kpg0.html">
|
|
captioned pictures</a>.
|
|
<br clear=left>
|
|
<p>
|
|
<table align=right vspace=5 hspace=5>
|
|
<caption align=bottom><font face="arial,helvetica" size=-1>
|
|
That's me with my one big winning hand playing poker. This photo was taken
|
|
at the SGI party. They gave you 2 grand worth of chips and you got to
|
|
gamble it away. The chips didn't have any real value, it was basically
|
|
fake money. It hurts not a bit to loose fake money, but its fun none
|
|
the less.
|
|
</font></caption>
|
|
<tr><td>
|
|
<img src=misc/adler/blackjackCrop.jpg>
|
|
</tr></table>
|
|
Congratulation! You made it to the end of my sc2k write-up. I want to
|
|
thank you for your attention and hope that you got something out of
|
|
your read. If you have any questions or comments,
|
|
please <a href="mailto:adler@bnl.gov"> e-mail</a> them to me. I
|
|
especially encourage people to report any corrections to the text you
|
|
may have found. If the e-mail I receive has some interesting comment
|
|
about the content of this write-up, I tend to post them at the end of
|
|
the write-up for others to read. Also, if you enjoyed this write-up, I
|
|
encourage you to sign up to my <a
|
|
href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/mailman/listinfo/steve-adler-announce">
|
|
announcements mailing list</a>, where you'll
|
|
get an e-mail when a new write-up has been posted to my website. Also,
|
|
you can find more of my past write-ups <a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/adler/SAArticles.html">here</a>.
|
|
<br clear=right>
|
|
<p>
|
|
Many thanks go to Duane Clark, Marie Bennington, Tundran and James Burley
|
|
for submitting e-mails pointing out lots of typos which they found
|
|
in the text. Again, thank you very much.
|
|
<p>
|
|
I would further like to thank <a href="mailto:busby@icf.llnl.gov">
|
|
Lee Busby</a> for converting
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/munoz.pdf">Jose Munoz's</a>
|
|
and
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/needham.pdf">Todd Needham's</a>
|
|
power point presentations into the more universal format of PDF.
|
|
|
|
<H2>Responses</H2>
|
|
|
|
The following are e-mails which I've received with comments on the
|
|
article. Thank you Frank and Barry for sending in your thoughts on
|
|
the article.
|
|
<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
|
|
[All response links are off-site. -Ed.]
|
|
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>
|
|
<p>
|
|
<a href="mailto:falove@home.com">Frank Love</a> writes in to
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/falove@home-com">tell me</a> about my
|
|
warts. Actually, everyone has these kinds of warts.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<a href="mailto:bstinso@att.net">Barry Stinson</a> has
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/bstinso@att-net"> comments</a> on my DOE
|
|
buddy, Jose Munoz and the Open Source panel discussion.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<a href="mailto:friedberg@exs.esb.com">Carl Friedberg</a>, a physicist,
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/friedberg@exs.esb-com">agrees</a> with my description of what
|
|
it's like to work for the government.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<a href="mailto:Andrew.Weiss@boxx.net">Andrew Weiss</a> writes in to
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/Andrew.Weiss@boxx-net">let me know</a> that the system which
|
|
I thought was going to Duke University may in fact be going to
|
|
U. of Delaware. Also the Bird is not extreem Tux but YoUDee, the U. of
|
|
Delaware mascot. Thanks Andrew for the clarification.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<a href="mailto:lucier@math.purdue.edu">Brad Lucier</a> was the first to
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/lucier@math.purdue-edu">write</a> in informing me that the 1U
|
|
rack of cpu's belong to API networks. Thanks for the clarification Brad.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<a href="mailto:dkinney@mail.arc.nasa.gov">David Kinney</a> from NASA
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/dkinney@mail.arc.nasa-gov">writes</a> in
|
|
to inform me that the aerial picture of the airport is of Moffet Field,
|
|
home of NASA Ames Research Center. Thank you David for figuring out
|
|
what the eye in the sky was looking at.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<a href="mailto:rich.brueckner@sun.com">Rich Brueckner</a> from Sun
|
|
Microsystems <a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/rich.brueckner@sun-com">writes</a> in with some
|
|
details of the Sun booth and the party they threw for the SC2000'ers.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<a href="mailto:melody@cmf.nrl.navy.mil">Patrick J Melody</a> from the
|
|
Naval Research Laboratory's Center for Computational Science,
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/melody@cmf.nrl.navy-mil">e-mailed</a> me to
|
|
tell me that they are the guys who demoed the 1.5 Gigabit streaming
|
|
video demo and the earth surface scan demo.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<a href="mailto:meyer@magiclemurs.com">Andy Meyer</a> has
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/meyer@magiclemurs-com">sent</a> in the most
|
|
detailed description of the aerial photo of the Moffett Federal
|
|
Airfield so far. Good work Andy.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<a href="mailto:busby@icf.llnl.gov">L. Busby</a> of Lawrence Livermore
|
|
National Laboratory has some <a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/busby@icf.llnl-gov">comments</a>
|
|
regarding the Open Source panel which are worth the read. Thank you
|
|
L. Busby for the e-mail.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<a href="mailto:sudog@sudog.com">Marc</a> sent in some rather frank
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/sudog@sudog-com">advice</a> regarding Open Source panel
|
|
discussions. I'll use his advice at the next opportunity. Maybe
|
|
someone else has better advice as to how to react in a public forum to
|
|
anti Open Source talk?
|
|
<p>
|
|
<a href="mailto:toddn@microsoft.com">Todd Needham</a> from Microsoft, who
|
|
was on the Open Source panel discussion, e-mailed me some <a
|
|
href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/toddn@microsoft-com">comments</a> about this article. I think
|
|
it's important to that his views on the panel and this article be
|
|
shared with the readers. I <a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/myreply"> replied</a> to Todd who
|
|
then replied back with <a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/toddn@microsoft-com.0">further
|
|
comments</a>. You can read my second reply to Todd
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/myreply2">here</a>.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<a href="mailto:catorres@friend.ly.net">Chris Torres</a> writes in to
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/catorres@friend.ly-net">thank me</a> for taking the time to
|
|
write the article. It's because of e-mail like yours Chris, which
|
|
motivate me to write these articles in the first place. I'm glad you
|
|
enjoyed the read.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<a href="mailto:conways@cray.com">Steve Conway</a> from Conway
|
|
Communications, sent in a <a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/conways@cray-com">reminder</a> of a
|
|
very important event which I missed at the show. This being an
|
|
announcement on "progress on plans for new performance benchmarks for
|
|
supercomputers and the hiring of DOE/NERSC to develop the new tests."
|
|
Sorry for missing it and not writing about it in this article.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<a href="mailto:shadowkiller@goconnect.net">Casey King</a>, from Australia,
|
|
writes in a
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/shadowkiller@goconnect-net">comment</a> or two about the SC2K
|
|
NOC picture I took. It looks like the networking gurus do aim for that
|
|
higher stabling standard in the sky... But it's just to high up there
|
|
to reach.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<a href="mailto:gerardo@sgi.com">Gerardo Cisneros</a> of SGI, wrote in to
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/gerardo@sgi-com">clarify</a> one of my comments I wrote in
|
|
the Open Source panel discussion regarding OS'es used to fly
|
|
airplanes. I knew what he was referring too, as did everyone in the
|
|
audience, so I went ahead and filled in his blanks.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<a href="mailto:turcotte@rose-hulman.edu">Louis H Turcotte</a>, the
|
|
SC2000 conference chair(!), read the article and has some interesting
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/turcotte@rose-hulman-edu">insights</a>. As it turns out, the
|
|
conference is organized by volunteers from around the country. He
|
|
writes, "I would like to share with your readers that SC is a
|
|
conference totally organized by volunteers - who work for 2-3 years to
|
|
create the week's worth of conference activities." Quite an impressive
|
|
effort Louis.
|
|
<p>
|
|
<a href="mailto:koen@hep.caltech.edu">Koen Holtman</a>, from Caltech,
|
|
wrote in to <a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/koen@hep.caltech-edu">clarify</a> Jose Munoz's
|
|
presentation on the Open Source panel. According to what Koen could
|
|
remember, Jose was playing the role of the devil's advocate, and thus
|
|
the negative slat toward his presentation. Thanks for the
|
|
clarification Koen.
|
|
<p>
|
|
Of all the people out there on the Internet who read this article,
|
|
(over 10,000 as of 6 Days after the initial posting on
|
|
www.linuxtoday.com,) it looks like <a href="mailto:rms@gnu.org">Richard
|
|
Stallman</a> found some time to read it and write me some
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/rms@gnu-org">comments</a> on the article. He thanks me for
|
|
recognizing the importance of the Free Software movement. Remember,
|
|
it's GNU/Linux!
|
|
|
|
<H2>More photos available</H2>
|
|
|
|
One final note. The photographs you find on this web page, in the
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/sc2k.html">
|
|
original article</a> and in the
|
|
<a href="http://ssadler.phy.bnl.gov/adler/sc2k/sc2kpg0.html">photo gallery</a> are only a small portion of
|
|
what I took at the conference. Specifically, I took photos of most of
|
|
the slides shown at the seti@home talk, Dr. Sterling's talk on COTS
|
|
super computers, Dr. Spafford's talk on computer security, and the
|
|
slides shown at the Open Source panel on the last day. If you are
|
|
interested in seeing these photos, <a href="mailto:adler@bnl.gov">
|
|
e-mail me</a> and I'll see what I can do about getting them to you.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
<!-- *** BEGIN copyright *** -->
|
|
<P> <hr> <!-- P -->
|
|
<H5 ALIGN=center>
|
|
|
|
Copyright © 2000, Stephen Adler.<BR>
|
|
Copying license <A HREF="../copying.html">http://www.linuxgazette.com/copying.html</A><BR>
|
|
Published in Issue 60 of <i>Linux Gazette</i>, December 2000</H5>
|
|
<!-- *** END copyright *** -->
|
|
|
|
<!--startcut ==========================================================-->
|
|
<HR><P>
|
|
<CENTER>
|
|
<!-- *** BEGIN navbar *** -->
|
|
<IMG ALT="" SRC="../gx/navbar/left.jpg" WIDTH="14" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom"><A HREF="lg_tips60.html"><IMG ALT="[ Prev ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/prev.jpg" WIDTH="16" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom"></A><A HREF="index.html"><IMG ALT="[ Table of Contents ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/toc.jpg" WIDTH="220" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom" ></A><A HREF="../index.html"><IMG ALT="[ Front Page ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/frontpage.jpg" WIDTH="137" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom"></A><A HREF="http://www.linuxgazette.com/cgi-bin/talkback/all.py?site=LG&article=http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue60/adler.html"><IMG ALT="[ Talkback ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/talkback.jpg" WIDTH="121" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom" ></A><A HREF="../faq/index.html"><IMG ALT="[ FAQ ]" SRC="./../gx/navbar/faq.jpg"WIDTH="62" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom"></A><A HREF="andreiana.html"><IMG ALT="[ Next ]" SRC="../gx/navbar/next.jpg" WIDTH="15" HEIGHT="45" BORDER="0" ALIGN="bottom" ></A><IMG ALT="" SRC="../gx/navbar/right.jpg" WIDTH="15" HEIGHT="45" ALIGN="bottom">
|
|
<!-- *** END navbar *** -->
|
|
</CENTER>
|
|
</BODY></HTML>
|
|
<!--endcut ============================================================-->
|