SIEminar: "Web pages made easy (for busy people)",
Wednesday 25 October 12.30, by Jorge A Pérez
These days you are nobody if you are not in the Internet. People use the web
to publish their work or express their opinions and also as a coordination
tool in their working groups. If you have thought about making a personal or
research group web page and you don't know how, the SIEminar of this month is
just for you. Jorge will show us how to quickly and easily write and publish
web pages with little knowledge of HTML. The full abstract in Spanish can be
found in the
SIE's Talks
and Courses Web page.
Chimera, the new 64 bits Beowulf cluster, open in beta
The new 64 bits Beowulf cluster (Chimera), is now open in beta, and is fast:
we obtained 151.9 GFlops (in
June 2002 we would have
made it into the
Top500 list) with the
Linpack benchmark (with Beoiac we obtained 78.47 GFlops). Most of the stuff
is already there, but during the coming weeks we'll continue tweaking it,
installing new libraries, adding documentation, performing benchmarks, etc.
The cluster has a similar look and feel to the old Beoiac, but it has some
important improvements: the compute nodes have 64 bits (EM64T) processors and
a total of 64GB RAM, and the storage space has been improved greatly, with a
bigger /home, a bigger /scratch, and a big disk of 3.9TB using PVFS2 for very
fast parallel write/reads to disk. If you want more information (how to get
an account, how to submit jobs, etc.) please check the
Chimera webpage.
Installation of LIRISDR in IRAF
LIRISDR, the IRAF package developed developed in-house by Jose Acosta and Miguel
Charcos to reduce
LIRIS data,
has been added to the current IRAF installation for Linux. To use it, load first
the
iactasks package. LIRISDR has been presented in the June SIEminar:
Como
reducir datos infrarrojos y no morir en el intento, and its usage is described
in the
User's
Guide to LIRIS Data Reduction. LIRISDR is still under development. Users
experiencing problems or having doubts or questions may cautiously and respectfully
approach Jose for help; comments and suggestions for improvement will be much
appreciated. Many thanks, Jose, for developing this very useful package and making
it available to the whole IAC community!
Hardware purchases
This year the deadline for buying computing material came earlier than the
previous years, and we duly complied. The most important purchases the SIE
has done are:
- 25 standard PCs, which will mainly replace aging Sun Workstations. As already
announced by the SIC, support to Sun Solaris machines and software is going
to be discontinued.
- 15 17-inch flat screens. Most of them will replace the tube monitors in the
"Sala de Usuarios", allowing its users more desk space and a more
comfortable environment.
- 1 MacBookPro laptop, to replace SIE's five+ years old Toshiba laptop.
- 1 64-bit PC with Virtual Technology enabled, to be used as a Virtual Cluster
where to develop, install and test new software or settings before committing
them to beoiac and chimera.
Installing a web server in your computer
If you are developing a web application using CGIs or a server-side
programming language, you may need a test server to run your scripts. The
most popular Web Platform is one called LAMP, a successful combination of an
Apache Server with PHP and a MySQL database running in a Linux machine (
Linux+
Apache+
MySQL+
PHP)
used also here at the IAC. The new
HowTo
in our
SIEpedia
shows you step-by-step how to make a local installation of a LAMP system in
your computer.