OceanPark

4-29-05 Benchmarking the new notebook

I'm benchmarking the speed of the new notebook tonight with a trial run of a distributed computing project with some regular real world work thrown in, too, which is the word processing I'm doing right now.

This is a fantastic notebook. The technology really has made a giant leap forward since my last one.

I would have used climateprediction.net, but their server appears to be down...again (sigh), so I've launched the old standby, SETI at Home Classic.

Right now, it's estimating a crunch time of 2 hours and three minutes, which would be stupendous. The 1.5GHz clock speed makes this technically the slowest box I have, but it has something the P4s and the AMD 64's don't, a giant 2Mb L2 cache that distributed programs like SETI seem to love.

Slightly more than one-fifth of the way through it's first SETI work unit and it's showing a completion time of 2:07 now. The 1.8GHz and 2.0GHz AMD 64 chips process units in the very low twos, as does the 3.4GHz P4. All four of those computers also have faster RAM (400MHz compared with the Acer's 333MHz). They also have tons more RAM, 3 gigs for the AMD boxes and 2 gigs for the gamer.

The computer with the least advantageous configuration: the P4 2.4GHz with 512Mb of the slowest DDR RAM (266MHz), completes SETI work units in just under four hours.

Running all five for 24 hours would probably churn out 68 work units a day, which is amazing.

My home network now stands at 14.9GHz of processing power, which is very likely quite a bit more than the entire NASA-Houston control center had to monitor the Apollo moon missions. I just love technology.

4-28-05 What a difference five years makes in a notebook computer

The Piii died this past week. Really ignominious ending. The screen blanked and it began to make this little whimpering, mewling noise as it repeatedly attempted to turn itself back on.

Fortunately, I got some serious mileage out of it over the years, particularly the last road trip for work to Arkansas, where it performed flawlessly. More recently, it had seemed as though it was even going to make the transition to wireless. While our new wood floor was being installed, it again got me through another work day using its new Linksys 2.4GHz wireless notebook adapter at a hotel set up with a wireless network.

I knew from work that the operating system we used would perform well enough on an ancient PII 300, so I figured I might get another year out of the much faster Piii 600. But, sadly, no.

Worse, I can't be without a mobile box these days, since I might have to be out of town for work again. So, I've been doing the due diligence thing in investigating notebooks, and while it was apparent that I wouldn't have to spend nearly as much as I did five years ago, it still looked as though I was going to have to plop down $1,500 to $2,000 on a suitable new box.

But then I called my buddies at Lantechservers.com Altaf and Ameen Lalani , and they hooked me up big time. These are the guys who built my Intel P4C 3.51 GHz gaming computer and my Dual Opteron 246 and 244 workstations and my Tiny Tower Chassis Intel P4A 2.4. Turns out they are also a reseller for all sorts of brands of notebooks computers, and they steered my toward an Acer.

When I bought the Piii all those computer years ago, it was going to be my main computer, so it needed desktop replacement credentials, and it had them.

It had a 600MHz Coppermine chip, the fastest available at the time, along with an expanded front side bus (100MHz) and 100MHz SDRAM memory. It also came with an 8x DVD ROM player, which was amazing at the time and had 8Mb of video RAM. Also ahead of it's time was the 15-inch SVGA TFT monitor.

Well, that bad boy set me back $2,995 and change. And a high end desktop computer replacement would require about as much today, while a gaming computer would be even more expensive. Fortunately, I don't need the notebook to fulfill those tasks anymore. It will be the work at home and work on the road computer, and it will perform some light entertainment functions while traveling and while I'm bored shitless in some hotel in Podunk, Idaho or wherever the heck they send me next time.

It is amazing to compare the specs on the two, one of which was the state of the art box five years ago while the other is about as "basic" as they come these days.

Old: Dell Inspiron 5000 w/Speedstep technology. New: Acer TM4001LCi w/Centrino technology.

Cost of old box: $2,995. Cost of new box: $899 (!!!).

Old CPU: Intel Piii @ 597MHz, Coppermine core (497MHz while on battery using speed step). New: Intel Pentium M 715, Banias core @ 1500MHz.

Old battery life: 2.5 hours. New: 5.0 hours.

Old: 100MHz FSB, 256kb L2 cache. New: 400MHz FSB, 2Gb L2 cache.

Old: 128Mb of 100MHz SDRAM, Maximum RAM amount: 512Mb. New: 512Mb of 333MHz DDRAM, Maximum RAM amount: 2Gb.

Old: 8Mb of video RAM. New: 64Mb of video RAM.

Old: 12Gb, 4200 rpm spin rate hard drive. New: 60Gb, 5400 rpm spin rate hard drive.

Old: 15-inch SVGA TFT screen, 1024-768 native resolution (considered breakthrough technology). New: 15-inch SVGA TFT monitor, 1024x768 native resolution (considered bare bones technology).

Old: integrated 56Kbps K-flex modem. New: integrated V.92 56Kbps modem, integrated 10/100 Base TX broadband, integrated IntelPRO/Wireless 2200BG network connection supporting 802.11b/g wireless LAN, Acer SignalUp technology for enhanced antenna efficiency.

Old: integrated 1.44Mb floppy drive, modular DVD-ROM drive, reads at 8x. External zip drive needed for storage backup. New: CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive. Reads 8x (DVDs) and 24x (CDs). Writes 24x CD-Rs and CD-RWs.

Weight, old: 8.5 lbs. Weight, new: 6.4 lbs.

Old: Windows 98. New: Windows XP Professional.

Dell Inspiron 5000. Acer Travelmate 4001.

4/27/05 Great Time to be a Gamer, Again

A lot of us did not have high hopes for 2005, especially after 2004 finally saw the arrival of much anticipated games such as Halo 2 by Bungie and Half Life 2, by vALVE, but 2005 is looking pretty darned good at the moment.

I'm currently two-thirds of the way through Project Snowblind, one of the latest from Eidos Interactive and Crystal Dynamics. Fans of Deus Ex and Deus Ex Invisible War will find a lot of reasons to like this game. The bots and biomods of DE and DEIW are back, for example. You're not J.C. Denton or his clone Alex D., but Nathan Frost is a pretty good substitute. One complaint: where is the Hellfire Boltcaster when you need it?

Last night I also loaded The Matrix Online and went on for the first time. I can't wait to get started. Last night was just a lot of training exercises and fight routines.

Next up, I have Area 51 by Midway on order. Yeah, 2005 is looking pretty good.

Both Ion Storm and Midway were and are located in Austin, Tx. Must be the only semi-cool location in the whole damn state.

4-16-05 A 5.1 Earthquake...

...kind of a nice, gentle, rolling motion. Very pleasant.

A moderate earthquake occurred at 12:18:13 PM (PDT) on Saturday, April 16, 2005.
The magnitude 5.1 event occurred 22 km (13 miles) W of Wheeler Ridge, CA.
The hypocentral depth is 11 km ( 7 miles).

Magnitude	5.1 - local magnitude (Ml)
Time	Saturday, April 16, 2005 at 12:18:13 PM (PDT) Saturday, April 16, 2005 at 19:18:13 (UTC)
Distance from	Wheeler Ridge, CA - 22 km (13 miles) W (277 degrees) Grapevine, CA - 24 km (15 miles) WNW (292 degrees) Taft, CA - 28 km (17 miles) ESE (117 degrees) Bakersfield, CA - 42 km (26 miles) SSW (203 degrees)
Coordinates	35 deg. 1.6 min. N (35.027N), 119 deg. 10.7 min. W (119.178W)
Depth	10.8 km (6.7 miles)
Quality	Fair
Location Quality Parameters	Nst=110, Nph=110, Dmin=12 km, Rmss=0.42 sec, Erho=0.3 km, Erzz=1 km, Gp=61.2 degrees
Event ID#	ci14138080
Map

4-12-05 Supervolcano

The Discovery Channel ran a very excellent docudrama on the Yellowstone Supervolcano Sunday night. It's three hours of decent acting combined with real science, topped off with Tom Brokaw in his new, post anchor Walter Cronkite role and interviews with real scientists.

Catch it if you can. It will air again on Saturday, April 16th, at 8 p.m. eastern and pacific times. Check local listings for other time zones.

I'm also reposting a blog I did on the world's most powerful volcanic eruptions, two of which occurred at Yellowstone.

THE TEN MOST POWERFUL VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS

There are few lists in science that are in more dispute than this one. By some notable accounts, for example, the eruption that is ranked number one on most lists, Toba, ranks second according to other analyses. Number two on many lists, Tambora, is sixth here. In spite of the disagreements, it's a fascinating subject.

1) Fish Canyon Tuff Eruption, La Garita Caldera. 27.8 million years ago. Location: Current day San Juan Mountains, San Juan Volcanic Field, southwestern Colorado, USA. 3,000 to 5,000+ km3 (cubic kilometers) of material ejected. (The scale here is virtually unimagineable. For the purposes of comparison, the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980 blew 1,314 feet off the top of the mountain, buried the North Fork of the Toutle river under as much as 150 feet of ash, and blew down 4 billion board feet of timber. Mount St. Helens ejected one cubic kilometer of material. By the way, tuff is the term used to describe volcanic ash and other kinds of ejecta that have solidified into rock deposits. Volcanic Explosivity Index: VIII. Mega-Colossal. Ultra Plinian.

2) Toba (Young Toba Tuff eruption). Location: Current day Indonesia, Island of Sumatra; 74,000 years ago. 2,800 km3 ejected. Pyroclastic flows covered an area of at least 20,000 square km. Toba is in the Sumatra Earthquake Fracture zone, the same one responsible for the Magnitude 9.0 earthquake on December, 26, 2004. VEI-VIII. Mega-Colossal. Ultra Plinian.

3) Yellowstone, Huckleberry Ridge Tuff. Location: Current day Yellowstone National Park. 2.2 million years ago. 2,500 km3 of ejecta. VIII. Mega-Colossal. Ultra Plinian.

4) Yellowstone, Lava Creek Tuff. 600,000 years ago. 1,000 km3 ejected. VIII. Mega-Colossal. Ultra Plinian.

5) Long Valley Caldera, 700,000 years ago. Present day Southern California. 800 km3 ejected. Very close to Los Angeles and still very much alive, unfortunately.

6) Tambora. Location: Sumbawa Island, Indonesia. 1815 A.D. 150 km3 of ejecta. VEI - VII. Super-Colossal.

7) Taupo. Present Day New Zealand. 180 A.D. VEI - VI.

8) Novarupta Vent (Katmai), the Valley of 10,000 Smokes, Alaska Peninsula. 1912. 15 km3 ejected. VEI- VI.

9) Krakatoa. Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java. 1883. 10 km3 of ejecta. Colossal. VEI- V.

10) Pinatubo. 1991. Philippines. 10 km3 ejected.

4-12-05 When Building Or Buying Your Dream Gaming Rig...

...don't ignore the power supply.

I suspect now that this has been my rig's primary problem all along. Occasional game crashes I attributed to improper settings on my video cards. Sluggish performance while multitasking, despite very high end components. Sluggish distributed computing performance, with machines with much slower components delivering much better processng times than mine.

What I had was a 350 watt power supply. Don't laugh. Most of the megawatt power users who insist on 550 and even 600 watt power supplies are into expensive and wasteful overkill. You just don't need that kind of juice.

But 350 was clearly not enough and I think the final straws were the addition of a third hard drive, three more cooling fans, and the ATi Radeon Pro 9800 All-In-Wonder video card. The 9800 was an upgrade from a 9600 A.I.W., the biggest difference being twice the pixel shaders: eight instead of four. But more importantly, the 9800 requires a direct feed from the power supply to ramp up its substantially larger cooling fan. All in all, the drain was probably too much.

So, the Lantech guys opted for the same 435 watt, High Quality Evolution power supply used in servers and in my two dual opteron workstations.

The difference has been very noticeable. No game crashes, and my climateprediction.net processing times have begun to drop again.

You can gain energy saving efficiencies in more productive ways than just scrimping on the power supplies, such as dual processor computers like my opterons. Instead of running six single cpu boxes with 350 watt power supplies each (2100 watts total), for example, I'm running four boxes and six CPUs at 435 watts each (1,740 watts). But I'd have to say that any top flight gaming rig probably ought to have 400 to 450 watts to be efficient. Mine seems much happier and more deadly now.

In fact, my box started out as an Intel P4C at 2.6Ghz with 512Mb of DDR400 RAM, one 80gig hard drive and the 9600 video card, a pair of cheap speakers, and two cooling fans.

It evolved into a hotter running and power hungry Intel P4E Prescott at 3.4Ghz, 2048Mb of faster DDR400 RAM, 730gigs of storage space on three hard drives, the 9800 video card, high output speakers and a total of six cooling fans.

Makes sense that a power upgrade was in order.

4-7-05 Shutting Down the Home Computer Network...

...for a few days while a new wood floor is installed in our home. Will take the opportunity to add new power supplies to the Dual Opterons and beef their RAM up to 3 gigs each. Ouch!

Back on by the weekend, I hope.

Later.

Meanwhile, made great strides on Climateprediction.net and now I'll have to make up the progress again when I get back online.

Account statistics
climateprediction.net member since	12 Feb 2005 17:39:13 UTC
Total credit	50188.79
equivalent HadSM3 Model-Years	331.94
Recent average credit	1692.66

Ranked #20 of 164 members of Team Ars Baked Alaska in Total Credit.

Ranked #6 of 164 members of Team Ars Baked Alaska in Recent Average Credit.

Ars Technica web site

4-5-05 You haven't been to the boondocks until you've been to Bentonville, Arkansas

Even the airport is a trip. They have one luggage carousel, surrounded by all of the rental car units. And you have to hoof it to your rental car, even the Hertz people. You leave the airport and there is nothing. Repeat. NOTHING. No lights. You think you're lost even when you are heading in the right direction because there is nothing but wide open pitch black space. They don't even have a decent two-lane freeway. So, you're tooling along, two hours later than L.A. time wise and driving about 45 on this narrow-ass blacktop they call a highway and thinking that you are lost and up behind you comes a big semi-trailer rig who isn't too frigging happy about having to drop his speed.

I swear I stopped three times on the way to the hotel because I just knew I HAD to be lost. They kept assuring me that I wasn't. I kept telling them, her, Debbie, that I didn't believe her.

Meanwhile, I'm on the freaking lookout for various wildlife who also think that they are in the middle of no where and thereby unmindful of the rights of cars and other vehicles at night. Deer. Armadilloes. I don't even fucking know how to spell Armadilloes. And possums. The lady at the rental car place was the one who warned me about the traveling nocturnal menagerie. She winked at me as she was telling me this. Women don't wink at you in L.A. They are guilty of a lot of transgressions, real and imagined, but they don't wink, unless maybe a Santa Ana wind is blowing and something just got caught in their eye. So, I don't know if she was flirting or putting me on. Maybe a little of both.

And they warned me about the speed traps waiting right outside the airport. Lotsa local Bubbas looking to fill their quota on the unsuspecting out of town city folk. So, that was also why I was driving 45 miles an hour on the "freeway."

Suddenly, out of the darkness, is the Clarion Conference Center and Hotel. I arrive at 10:05 p.m. local time. Room service, I'm told, ended at 10 p.m.

Debbie, who I swear had the biggest eyes I have ever seen, is kind enough to give me the number of the local Domino's Pizza, which is the only place that delivers "at this hour" she says. Sigh.

I then ask if the hotel has a broadband connection. She looks at me as if I just started speaking in Latin. I try a different tack, realizing that just about anything that is about to leave my mouth at this point is going to border on condescension or insult. Like commenting on the fact that the hotel looks absolutely deserted.

Lots of bandwidth, I try. Still Latin, maybe moving on to Greek. Hard to tell.

"Do you have fat phone plugs in the rooms?"

Debbie contemplates this for a second and says that she doesn't know.

I get to the room and, thankfully (this was actually worthy of a Hallelujah at this point), I see that they have broadband connections.

I order a pizza and decide to call Debbie at the front desk, lest some other businessman consider staying somewhere else on the count of no broadband connection.

"So, you do have a high speed internet connection," I said.

She responds that she did know that. So, she asks, broadband and high speed are the same thing? Yes, I said, in most places anyway.