Malcolm Yoke Hean Low

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Leap Year Bug in Microsoft Zune Player

Posted on Tuesday, January 06, 2009 at 12:45 PM by Malcolm

On December 31, 2008, every Zune 30 device freezes due to a leap year bug in a driver from Freescale Semiconductor in a "while loop". Obviously a leap year test case is not carried out on the driver. See this article for details. Edited on: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 3:20 PM

Posted in General (RSS) , Teaching (RSS)

Four Paths to HPC using Java

Posted on Friday, December 19, 2008 at 1:19 AM by Malcolm

This article from JDJ gives a high-level description of four approaches using fork/join framework, Pervasive DataRush, Terracotta, and Hadoop for writing parallel applications in Java.

Edited on: Tuesday, December 23, 2008 7:18 PM

Posted in HPC (RSS)

Parallel Programming: Three Things You Must Teach

Posted on Friday, December 19, 2008 at 12:53 AM by Malcolm

From Intel Software College, this series of three lectures provides an introduction to parallel programming.

Module 1. Recognizing Potential Parallelism





Module 2. Shared Memory and Threads

Part 1





Part 2





Module 3. Programming with OpenMP

Part 1





Part 2



Edited on: Tuesday, December 23, 2008 7:16 PM

Posted in HPC (RSS)

Google Code University - Introduction to Parallel Programming and MapReduce

Posted on Friday, December 19, 2008 at 12:40 AM by Malcolm

This tutorial from the Google Code University covers the basics of parallel programming and the MapReduce programming model. The pre-requisites are significant programming experience with a language such as C++ or Java, and data structures & algorithms.

Posted in General (RSS) , HPC (RSS) , Research (RSS)

Obama Wins Historic US Election

Posted on Wednesday, November 05, 2008 at 11:09 PM by Malcolm

Edited on: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 11:31 PM

Posted in General (RSS)

Understanding Parallel Performance - How do we know we've succeeded?

Posted on Monday, November 03, 2008 at 1:22 PM by Malcolm

In this article, Microsoft software architect Herb Sutter discusses some key issues to keep in mind for accurately analyzing the real performance of parallel code. The article uses simple example code to point out basic considerations and common costs in developing parallel programs.

Edited on: Monday, November 03, 2008 9:33 PM

Posted in (RSS)

Multi-agent, Parallel Processing, Robotic, Warehousing

Posted on Saturday, November 01, 2008 at 7:50 PM by Malcolm

This article from the July issue of IEEE Spectrum describes a state-of-the-art agent-based robotic warehousing system. Unlike traditional warehouse where operators go around the warehouse picking orders, in this system, swarms of robots controlled by an agent-based scheduling, dispatching and traffic control system, worked in parallel to bring shelves to the operators for picking. The system has already been deployed by Staples, Walgreens and Zappos.

Posted in General (RSS) , Tech (RSS)

10 Great Tech Books

Posted on Sunday, October 19, 2008 at 6:59 PM by Malcolm

From the July issue of IEEE Spectrum, below are 10 great general-interest books about technology.

• The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroski
• Mirror Worlds; or, The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How it Will Happen and What it Will Mean by David Gelernter
• A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
• The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
• The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing by David Kahn
• Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham
• Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

The links to these books on Amazon are listed in this page.

Posted in General (RSS) , Tech (RSS)

Professor Who Wrote 200,000+ Books

Posted on Saturday, October 18, 2008 at 12:17 PM by Malcolm

This interesting article describes how a management science professor make use of publicly available data on internet and computer AI to automatically "generate" 200,000 books and publishes and sells them for profit.

Edited on: Saturday, October 18, 2008 12:18 PM

Posted in General (RSS) , Tech (RSS)

Programming Languages - 6 Scripting Languages Your Developers Wish You'd Let Them Use

Posted on Friday, October 17, 2008 at 10:24 AM by Malcolm

Links to Programming Languages

6 Scripting Languages Your Developers Wish You'd Let Them Use

• Scala
• Groovy
• Clojure
• Lua
• F#
• Boo

Edited on: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 2:39 PM

Posted in General (RSS) , Research (RSS) , Tech (RSS)

Oxford and Cambridge offer lectures on Apple's iTunes

Posted on Wednesday, October 08, 2008 at 10:21 AM by Malcolm

The universities of Oxford and Cambridge are to make lectures by well-known academics available through Apple's iTunes.

More than 150 hours of free audio and video podcasts from the University of Oxford are now available on a new site on iTunes U.

Cambridge on iTunes U offer more than 300 audio and video tracks covering a broad range of themes; delve into the Enron scandal, take a guided tour of the exhibitions at the Fitzwilliam museum by leading experts, and listen to the regular contributions from the St John's College choir - all without having to leave your house!

Edited on: Wednesday, October 08, 2008 10:22 AM

Posted in General (RSS) , Teaching (RSS)

Why Lazy Functional Programming Languages are Good for Multicore

Posted on Saturday, September 20, 2008 at 11:25 AM by Malcolm

In this article, Peyton-Jones describes his interest in lazy functional programming languages, and chats about their increasing relevance in a world with rapidly increasing multi-core CPUs and clusters. "I think Haskell is increasingly well placed for this multi-core stuff, as I think people are increasingly going to look to languages like Haskell and say 'oh, that's where we can get some good ideas at least', whether or not it's the actual language or concrete syntax that they adopt.'"

Edited on: Saturday, September 20, 2008 11:27 AM

Posted in General (RSS) , HPC (RSS)

CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses

Posted on Saturday, September 20, 2008 at 11:22 AM by Malcolm

This series of articles introduces the power of CUDA -- through working code -- and to the thought process to help programmers map applications onto multi-threaded hardware (such as GPUs) to get big performance increases. Of course, not all problems can be mapped efficiently onto multi-threaded hardware, so part of the thought process will be to distinguish what will and what won't work, plus provide a common-sense idea of what might work "well-enough".

• CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses: Part 1
• CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses: Part 2
• CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses: Part 3
• CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses: Part 4
• CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses: Part 5
• CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses: Part 6
• CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses: Part 7
• CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses: Part 8

Edited on: Saturday, September 20, 2008 11:27 AM

Posted in HPC (RSS)

Stanford frees CS, robotics courses

Posted on Thursday, September 18, 2008 at 11:02 AM by Malcolm

Stanford University will soon begin offering a series of 10 free, online computer science and electrical engineering courses. Initial courses will provide an introduction to computer science and an introduction to field of robotics, among other topics. The courses, offered under the auspices of Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE), are nearly identical to standard courses offered to registered Stanford students and will comprise downloadable video lectures, handouts, assignments, exams, and transcripts.

Edited on: Saturday, September 20, 2008 11:26 AM

Posted in General (RSS)

9 Reusable Parallel Data Structures and Algorithms

Posted on Wednesday, September 17, 2008 at 9:36 AM by Malcolm

This article looks at nine reusable data structures and algorithms that are common to many parallel programs. Each example is accompanied by fully working, though not completely hardened, tested, and tuned, code. The list is by no means exhaustive, but it represents some of the more common patterns. Many of the examples build on each other.

Edited on: Thursday, September 18, 2008 12:08 AM

Posted in HPC (RSS)

How Videogames Blind Us With Science

Posted on Monday, September 08, 2008 at 2:17 PM by Malcolm

Kids who are turning away from Science are actually applying scientific reasoning to analyze videogames. From the article: "they were pretty good at figuring out how to defeat the bosses. One day she found out why. A group of them were building Excel spreadsheets into which they'd dump all the information they'd gathered about how each boss behaved: What potions affected it, what attacks it would use, with what damage, and when. Then they'd develop a mathematical model to explain how the boss worked -- and to predict how to beat it."

Edited on: Monday, September 08, 2008 2:19 PM

Posted in General (RSS) , Science (RSS)

Lifelike Animation

Posted on Saturday, September 06, 2008 at 12:53 PM by Malcolm

From the story: "The woman above is not real. I mean, she was real once, when real actress Emily O'Brien provided Image Metrics (you know their work from GTAIV) with 35 facial poses in front of a pair of digital cameras. From there, O'Brien was dismissed so the animators could go to work. Apparently "ninety per cent of the work is convincing people that the eyes are real." And the results, while not always perfect, are pretty extraordinary."

Edited on: Saturday, September 06, 2008 4:48 PM

Posted in General (RSS) , Tech (RSS)

Parallel Programming Made Easy

Posted on Saturday, September 06, 2008 at 12:34 PM by Malcolm

Michael Wolfe from Protland Group looks at all the current research projects aimed at making parallel programming easy. He has this to say "Every time I see someone claiming they've come up with a method to make parallel programming easy, I can't take them seriously. First, making parallel programming easy must be harder than making programming easy, and I don't think we've reached that first milestone yet."

Edited on: Saturday, September 06, 2008 12:36 PM

Posted in HPC (RSS)

Online course on multi-core performance from NCSA

Posted on Thursday, September 04, 2008 at 9:30 AM by Malcolm

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is offering a new Web-based course, "Introduction to Multi-core Performance." This tutorial helps current and prospective users of multi-core systems understand and use the technology to accelerate their research. Multi-core processors, which hold the promise of enhanced performance and more efficient parallel processing, are a key stepping stone on the path to petascale computation. Applications that run on multi-core systems must be optimized to take full advantage of the improved performance offered by multi-core technology. To browse the course catalog, go to ci-tutor.ncsa.uiuc.edu/browse.php . To create a login and take a course, go to ci-tutor.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ .

Edited on: Thursday, September 04, 2008 10:42 AM

Posted in General (RSS) , HPC (RSS)

Google Browser: Google Chrome

Posted on Tuesday, September 02, 2008 at 11:18 AM by Malcolm

Google will be launching a new opensource browser, Google Chrome. The news was accidently leaked when a copy of the comic book describing the browser was released.



Edited on: Tuesday, September 02, 2008 12:46 PM

Posted in General (RSS)