In 1967 Gene Amdahl presented a way to calculate the maximum speedup that could be obtained by running a computer program in parallel, i.e. splitting the work the program needs to do across multiple cores in the computer. The idea is that there is some part of the program that can be made [...]
This is a very brief summary of some free tools that you can bring together to create screencasts on a Windows computer. We have a YouTube video about this: Links to the software mentioned in the video are below: Camstudio - record a screencast Xvid - an mpeg4 codec to create smaller video files [...]
For those of us who missed the day, version 4.0.0 of GNU Octave was released on May 29, 2015. GNU Octave is a numerical programming environment that is very compatible with Mathworks' Matlab. GNU Octave is (from the GNU Octave web site) "a high-level interpreted language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides capabilities for [...]
I received a new Solid State Drive for Christmas, after a bit of complaining about the response time for things that I do on my desktop computer. Rebooting was taking quite a while, about 15 minutes before the applications were fully available and responsive. Starting applications seemed slow, in particular Adobe CS 5 [...]
The Oculus Rift The Oculus Rift is a portable (head-mounted) virtual reality system available from Oculus VR. The sense of immersion in a virtual environment comes largely from the ability to change your position and have the view change naturally, as it would in the real world. The sense of immersion is also increased by [...]
The arrangement of data in computer memory is a continuing source of discussion and confusion because the language is also used in the context of arranging data in data files. We will discuss, and hopefully clarify, the usage of the language of row- and column-major ordering. When a vector, or a 1-dimensional matrix, [...]
Videre Analytics is holding a workshop at the University of Alberta on Scientific Visualization with Paraview on Monday, December 8, 2014. The workshop presents principles and methods for visualizing data resulting from scientific measurements and computations. We discuss basic principles of scientific visualization and aspects of successful visualizations. The discussion will focus on Paraview, but the [...]
The provision of HPC resources requires more than system administration. It takes a team of skilled analysts able to work with user codes and make them run more efficiently with large numbers of processors. These analysts must work closely with both the administrators and clients to ensure that jobs run smoothly and costly resources are used effectively. [...]
Hadoop is an open source Apache project hadoop.apache.org (downloads are available through mirror sites which are listed on their home page) The current tool for Big Data analysis is Hadoop, a software framework that supports the distribution of computational work to many nodes in a computer cluster. Hadoop’s design makes it particularly effective at processing [...]
The picture of how data gets analysed on a single computer is very simple: a program is written to read the data, do some manipulation and write out the results. This is something that every student of programming learns to do. The figure below shows a whimsical interpretation of software processing a data file. The [...]
