~pvital Blog

During this year, I worked in the Linux version of the IBM ServerGuide Scripting Toolkit (SGSTK), one of  the tools from IBM System x® ToolsCenter. The SGSTK is a collection of system-configuration tools and installation scripts that you can use to deploy software to your IBM eServer or xSeries server in a repeatable, predictable manner.

After two older releases this year, today we release the version 2.00 of  the SGSTK. This version is very special for the development team, because we worked hard to develop a new framework, more stable, robust and (why not?) beauty, than the older one.  You can download it from here.

My wife is working in Mexico City, and I’m going to there tonight to meet her and know one of the biggest city of world.

I’ll try to post a review when I back. I’m be there for one week, once I’m not on vacation (it is a pro of “mobile work”).

So, Hasta luego!!!

This end of year was a little fast. A lot of things to do and 24 hours is not enough for a day (I’m not Jack Bauer), but we (I and my wife) had time to create a Christmas card to send to our friends our message. The card is available here.

Besides the card, I sent a link with a video of one of the best guittar players of the world, José Feliciano, singing his Christmas song.

So, Gabriela and I wish Happy Holidays and a Prosperous New Year to you and your family.

Last Friday, October 24th, IBM released the IBM SDK for Multicore Acceleration Version 3.1 (a.k.a Cell SDK 3.1) with support to two different Linux® distributions (RHEL 5.2 and Fedora 9) and in three different package bundles: Product, Developer, and Extras.

As reported here,  about 1 month ago I was replaced to the Cell IDE project, and the IDE is one of the great number of SDK’s packages.

After 46 days away, I returned yesterday to work. On August, 2nd I broke my left arm playing soccer at the IBM Cup and I could not work.

During this time offline, I was moved to the Cell IDE project. Cell IDE is a set of Eclipse plug-ins that integrate the Cell Broadband Engine tool chain and enable rapid building of Cell Broadband Engine applications, and it is included in the IBM SDK for Multicore Acceleration.

This change is good for me, once in my master’s project I’m working with transactional memories applied to the Cell processor and other multicore processors. I guess this new project gives me a lot of opportunity and changes to grow up.

Last July 31, André Macêdo, Alex Zanetti and I organized a kind of different happy hour. We invite all the LTCers to participate of a contest: the King of Mustache. As Lucas Meneghel and Tiago Bauermann mentioned, the competition was fierce as you can see here.

The main idea was to group the guys from LTC in a nice and fun happy hour. The competition had about 15 guys looking for to be the king. The man with the best mustache was Daniel Debonzi (or Fred Mercury, or Mario Bros.). He has seven more votes than me (second place) as you can see here.

At the end the idea was wonderful. We could group the major part of the LTC Brazil team, and had a nice moment of integration. Now it’s time to wait to the next year contest, that will be organized by the king ;-{D

Today a new list of the 500 world’s most powerful supercomputers (Top500) was presented at the 23rd International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany. This list has a particular issue: the petaflops barrier was broken. The responsible by this fact? Roadrunner, the most powerful supercomputer of the world.

Roadrunner, named after the New Mexico state bird, cost about US $100 million, and was designed and build by IBM at Los Alamos National Laboratory to the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. It is the world’s first hybrid supercomputer, designed to Cell Broadband Engine® works with the Opteron® processors from AMD. A few numbers of Roadrunner:

• connects 6,562 dual-core AMD Opteron® chips as well as 12,240 Cell chips (on IBM Model QS22 blade servers),
• has 98 terabytes of memory,
  
• is housed in 278 refrigerator-sized, IBM BladeCenter® racks occupying 5,200 square feet,
• has 10,000 connections – both Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet — that required 55 miles of fiber optic cable,
• weighs 500,000 lbs.

But other important thing about Roadrunner is its operating system: a Linux version from Red Hat. All the Top10 most powerful supercomputers have Linux. Four of them have only Linux running: #1 Roadrunner (IBM), #4 Ranger (Sun Microsystems), #5 Jaguar (Cray Inc.), #7 Encanto (SGI), #8 EKA (Hewlett-Packard) and #10 Total’s SGI Altix (SGI). The rest of them have a kind of mixed system (Linux+something): #2 BlueGene/L (IBM), #3 Argonne Blue Gene/P Solution (IBM), #6 JUGENE Blue Gene/P Solution (IBM) and #9 IDRIS Blue Gene/P Solution (IBM) have SLES9+CNK.

The number of supercomputers with Linux have increased by the years. From the 500 supercomputers of the last list, 427 have Linux and 40 have a mixed system with Linux (UNICOS/Linux, CNK/SLES 9, UNICOS/SUSE Linux and UNICOS/lc). See the official numbers here. The first time that a supercomputer with Linux appeared in the Top500 list was on June,1998. The development of the Linux usage by the years can be visualized here.

I installed the Debian AMD64 port in my new desktop. But there is a common problem when using a 64 bit system and the Firefox (or Iceweasel) browser: there aren’t plugins to Flash, Java and RealPlayer.

Before search a little bit about how solve this problem, I found some links ([1], [2] and [3]) that explain how to solve the problem. Basically, the articles recommend to use the nspluginwrapper, an Open Source plugin that allows you to use Netscape compatible (NPAPI) plugins on platforms that they were not built on.

[1] http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/linux-amd64.html
[2] http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-flash-java-realplayer-under-64bit-firefox.html
[3] http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/534

So, I decided to test the installation of the Flash plugin, using the nspluginwrapper. First, I wanted to know if there was the plugin as a DEB package in some of my apt-get repositories (see here my sources.list):

Very good! Better is impossible! So, I installed it and it’s depecencies: ia32-libs, ia32-libs-gtk, lib32gcc1, libc6, libc6-i386, libglib2.0-0, libx11-6, libxt6 and util-linux.

Installing the Flash Player

The next step was download the new Flash Player 10 from here. After the download has completed, I decompress the tarball, and copied the libflashplayer.so file to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins:

Once the Flash plugin is in the browser directory, I ran the nspluginwrapper command, and the result was:

After this, I restarted my Iceweasel, and tried to use a page that have flash, and voilá! I have a Flash plugin now!

About one week ago, I bought a new desktop machine for me. It’s a Intel® Core™2 Duo E4500 with 1Gb of RAM, DVD-RW and 160Gb SATA. The motherboard is a GigaByte™ one with all on-board.

But, the most important thing is that I could install the 64bits (AMD64 port) testing version of Debian, and once the processor has two cores, I can start to learn more about OpenMP and multithreaded programming. I’m writing the steps I used to install the Debian in this machine (AMD64+boot by USB), and it will be available soon.

Other important thing, was about the default operating system that the computer’s shop wanted install in this machine. Here in Brazil, it’s common the computer’s shops installs not original versions of Windows when you buy a new machine. But, in this case, the shop I bought the machine installs by default a version of Ubuntu (I don’t know which one) in all new machines if the customer didn’t buy a Windows license. I thought this a great initiative from them.

The Australian PC World edition created an interesting Quiz about some historical Linux facts. The quiz has 10 questions ans they are very nice to check if you remember dates and name of the companies and persons from the first years of Linux.

I did the quiz, and my score was not good: 60% (for me a good score should be more than 80%).

If you have more than 12 years of Linux usage or think that know all about the Linux history, check your knowledge  here.

Have Fun!