SIEminar: "GPUs: supercomputing in a desktop
PC" - 24 October at 12.30
A
recent paper on using
Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for calculating N-Body simulations woke
up our curiosity for these monster crunching creatures (you can see a
Real-Time
N-BODY simulation accelerated by GPU at YouTube), and we invited two
experts (and regular IAC collaborators) to give us a primer on this field:
Dr. José M. Rodríguez Ramos and Ing. José G. Marichal
Hernández (ULL)
They will give us an introduction to GPUs and how they can be used not only
for graphical applications, but also for general programming, and how we can
turn an ordinary PC into a 1 TeraFlop machine by just adding 2 graphical
cards, for less than 1000 Euros. As an example of their use for scientific
programming they will show how to calculate FFTs for an Adaptive Optics
problem. You can get more information (in spanish) about this talk at the
SIE
Talks and Courses page.
IRAF is dead ... no, it's still alive and kicking
As you have propably already heard, a couple of years ago NOAO slashed its
official support to IRAF, whose development continued thanks to the efforts
(on a voluntary basis) of some of the IRAF developers and with an important
community participation through the
http://iraf.net/ website and forum. Now NOAO has
resumed its support to IRAF, and major revisions and new functionalities are
planned, as described in
http://iraf.net/article.php/20070830134217243
and presented in the IRAF BoF at the ADASS XVII Conference in London a couple
of weeks ago. In particular, a new 2.14 beta release will be soon available,
with a stable, final 2.14 release expected for early next year: this version
will contain various improvements to the core system, plus new packages, in
particular one to access data archives and catalogs from within IRAF. The new
Ximtool display will work, at last, in 24-bit depth. Not only regular IRAF
users, but even President Bush and his staff have been quite impressed by
these very good news:
http://www.theonion.com/video/in-the-know-white-house-announces-everything-is-gr,14169/!
KDE quirks and solutions
While being a great Desktop Environment, from time to time KDE may display
some bizarre behavior. So far we have detected a couple of major problems,
luckily both with a easy and quick solution:
- Upon loggin in from the console, the message "Your session only lasted
less than 10 seconds" appears, and the login screen is showed once again.
The solution is to select KDE from the session options, and, after we have
logged in, execute the command: switchdesk KDE.
This should fix the problem once and forever.
- All of sudden, windows become "fixed". When clicking on the edge of
the window or on the window bar, the cursor changes to the correct shape
(for instance an arrow) and it moves as expected. However, the windows themselves
can not be moved or resized (though they can be minimized), something which can
become quite annoying. If this happens to you, just type in any terminal:
kwin --replace &, and Bob's your uncle!
KompoZer, a new Web authoring tool
First it was Mozilla Composer. Then, after Mozilla Composer was no longer
developed and supported, NVU came, with the ambition of becoming a powerful,
open source alternative to such professional tools as Dreamweaver or
Frontpage. Unfortunately, NVU only went so far as version 1.0 in March 2005,
then it just stopped there. Now, a new project called
KompoZer tries to build upon NVU's
experience, and looks quite promising. We have not tried it out though - just
had a quick look -, but we invite anybody interested in it to download and
play with this package, which is available for Windows, Linux and MacOSX as
well. If you think KompoZer is good enough that it should be installed
IAC-wide, just let us know.