How to build a supercomputer for less than $50k

Answer: buy 70 PlayStation 2s and hook them up via a Hewlett-Packard switch. NCSA engineers have just done it, and it works. “It took a lot of time because you have to cut all of these things out of the plastic packaging,” said Craig Steffen, a senior research scientist at the center, who is one of four scientists working part time on the project. According to the Times report, the NCSA scientists “are taking advantage of a standard component of the Sony video-game console that was originally intended to move and transform pixels rapidly on a television screen to produce lifelike graphics. The chip is not the PlayStation 2’s MIPS microprocessor, but rather a graphics co-processor known as the Emotion Engine. That custom designed silicon chip is capable of producing up to 6.5 billion mathematical operations a second.”

But now comes the really interesting bit. Why did they choose the Playstation? Answer: “The supercomputing center scientists said they had chosen the PlayStation 2 because Sony sells a special Linux module that includes a high-speed network connection and a disk drive.

By contrast, it is almost impossible for researchers to install the Linux system on Microsoft’s Xbox game console.

Using a network of machines is not a new concept in the supercomputing world. Linux, which plays a major role in that world, has been used to assemble high-performance parallel computers built largely out of commodity hardware components. These machines are generally called Beowulf clusters.”

Modern Manners: No. 428

Overheard by a colleague in a Cambridge supermarket the other day. A mother admonishing her young son for swearing said:

“You don’t say ‘Jesus Christ’, you say ‘Cor blimey’ ” !!

Next target for Microsoft’s strategic largesse: the non-profit sector

According to the NYT , Redmond is significantly increasing its donation of software to the nation’s nonprofit organizations, to a level that may approach $1 billion annually in the next three to four years. Why the sudden outbreak of generosity on the company‘s part (remember it’s Gates as an individual who gives to the wholly-excellent Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation)? Answer: “critics say they believe Microsoft is using a giveaway strategy to undercut the so-called free software movement in the potentially promising nonprofit market”. Well, I never….

US legislators to get serious about spam?

Register report.

The US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation held hearings on the problem last week. According to the Register report, “The hearing … heard that spam costs US businesses $10 billion each year in lost productivity. According to Enrique Salem, president of spam blocking company Brightmail, nearly half of all e-mails sent are spam. This compared, he said, with just seven percent in 2001. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has also seen an explosion in the number of complaints it receives from consumers about spam. In 2001, around 10,000 junk e-mails were forwarded to it each day from Internet users. That daily figure now stands closer to 130,000. Such evidence seems to be having the desired effect on American lawmakers. Although Congress has failed to crackdown on spam in the past, following pressure from some retailers, marketing firms and business users of e-mail, it appears that tighter regulation will be introduced some time this year. Two Senators, one Republican and one Democrat, have proposed a bill that would ban deceptive subject lines, require valid return addresses and order spammers to obey requests by e-mail users to stop sending them e-mail. In addition, Senator Schumer from New York wants an international anti-spam treaty. For its part, Microsoft is seeking increased penalties for fraudulent practices by spammers. It is also pushing for an electronic seal-of-approval system for legitimate marketers and for unsolicited mails to be labelled as such so that e-mail users could delete them without having to open them.”

Ethernet will be 30 next Thursday

Hooray! Nice interview with Bob Metcalfe, who with Dave Boggs invented it at that wonderful ideas factory, Xerox PARC. Interviewer asked “Why did you come up with the name Ethernet?”

Answer: ” The luminiferous ether was once theorized to pervade all of space and was passive and omnipresent, a medium for the propagation of electromagnetic waves and particularly carrying light from the sun to the earth. That was the 1800s, and around 1900, thanks to Michaelson, Morley, and Einstein, et al., the ether was determined not to exist. So in 1973, while searching for a word to describe the medium that would be everywhere, that would be passive and would serve as a medium for the propagation of electromagnetic waves into particular data packets, we took that word that had fallen into disuse and called it the ether network.”

What if SCO is right?

As every geek must know by now, SCO — the company which now owns the licence to UNIX — is claiming that Linux contains some proprietary UNIX code. If true, I thought, this could be serious for everyone. But this interesting column by Mitch Wagner points out a serious potential flaw in any lawsuit SCO launches — namely that it has itself been distributing Linux for years under a GPL licence!

Amazing research archive

Just discovered an amazing archive of research papers published about the Net between 1999 and 2003.

Meanwhile, back at the real war…

As the US and the UK struggle to impose order on a shattered Iraq, the New York Times reports that “U.S. Officials See Signs of a Revived Al Qaeda”. And, right on cue, suicide bombers kill 41 people in Casablanca. “Leaders and operatives of Al Qaeda”, says the Times, “have reorganized bases of operations in at least a half-dozen locations, including Kenya, Sudan, Pakistan and Chechnya…

The leaders have begun to recruit new members, train the new followers and plan new attacks on Western targets in earnest, according to senior counterterrorism officials in Washington, Europe and the Middle East. As evidence of this, senior government officials pointed to the secret arrests in the United States in the last two months of two Arab men suspected of having been sent by senior leaders of Al Qaeda to scout targets for new terror attacks.

The two recently apprehended men, whom the officials would not identify, were said to be conducting “presurveillance” activities. They were part of a larger group of about six Qaeda followers arrested in recent months whose presence in the United States has led the authorities to conclude that the terrorist group remains determined to carry out attacks on American soil, officials said.”

What if…?

“Who assumes the presidency if a deranged Islamist sneaks a nuclear suitcase bomb into an inaugural, … vaporizing not only the President and the Vice President but also most of the Cabinet, the Supreme Court, and Congress?” Fascinating piece in The Atlantic about Norman Ornstein’s attempts to get American constitutionalists to think about the unthinkable.

France’s Minitel is 20 this year

BBC Online story. Funny how things change: once upon a time, France was the only country in the world with a serious e-commerce and online information infrastructure — via the closed but freely available Minitel system. That was in 1983, the year the Internet was switched on. Then came the Web, and with it the idea that boring old steam-age Minitel was finished. Well, maybe it was, but the Web has yet to deliver the same reliability and micro-billing capability.