Kirk Pearson's Weblog

World's largest computing grid now has over 100 Sites According to a PhysOrg.com article, the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (LCG) project is now "the world's largest international scientific computing grid," with over 100 sites in 31 countries. The grid, containing "more than 10,000 central processor units (CPUs) and a total of nearly 10 million Gigabytes of storage capacity on disk and tape" will process data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator which will begin operating in 2007. The current status of the LCG project (and a map of participating sites) can be seen here. Even with the grid's record-breaking size, it only has 5% of the computing capacity that the LHC will eventually need. (2005-03-15 13:13:00.0) Permalink Comments [7]

A 4,000 Megapixal Camera A recent Wired Magazine article describes a film camera, designed by physicist Graham Flint from spy plane and nuclear reactor parts, with a resolution of 4 gigapixels. The camera uses 9x18 inch photographic plates with a resolution of 4,000 pixels per inch. Images from the camera are scanned with a Leica Geosystems scanner, which produces 4 gigapixel digital images. Each image fills one DVD. "The images are printed in strips on a large-format Epson 9600 printer and mounted on panels like wallpaper." One print could measure up to 48x24 feet. Flint designed the camera to "photograph the entire Milky Way in color and very high resolution," but his New Mexico observatory was shut down for health reasons before he could begin that project. He now tours the United States making thousands of photographs of "cities, monuments and national parks." You can see more of his pictures at his Gigapxl Project website. (2005-02-07 15:35:09.0) Permalink Comments [1]

grid.org's Smallpox Project Completed

grid.org and the University of Oxford have completed their distributed computing project to find a drug to fight Smallpox, a viral disease which could be used as a bioterror weapon and for which currently there is no cure. The project began on February 5, 2003. Phase 1 of the project was completed on September 30, 2003. That phase used 39,000 years of computing time from volunteers in 190 countries to screen "35 million potential drug molecules against eight models of the smallpox protein" to determine if any of them would prevent the virus from replicating. Potential drug candidates from this project will be studied more closely in another phase of research. No news has been posted about the results of the complete project yet, but the project's news page should be updated soon. The results from this project may also benefit grid.org's project to find cancer-fighting drugs.

So what disease is your computer trying to cure? If it's not, pick a project and get started.

distributed.net completes its OGR-24 project

distributed.net successfully completed its OGR-24 distributed computing project on November 1, 2004. This project, which began over 4 years ago, used a brute force method to find the shortest, or optimal, 24-mark Golomb ruler, a ruler in which no two marks are the same distance apart. The project tested over 555,529,785,505,835,800 rulers (twice, to verify its results), and determined that the previously best-known ruler, 24/9-24-4-1-59-25-7-11-2-10-39-14-3-44-26-8-40-6-21-15-16-19-22, is optimal. Almost 42,000 volunteers participated in the project.

distributed.net is currently running an OGR-25 project, which began over 4 years ago and is over 65% complete, and a RC5-72 project (an attempt to solve the 72-bit RSA Labs secret-key challenge), which began over 2 years ago and is 0.16% complete.

SpaceShipOne has won the X Prize!

SpaceShipOne has won the X Prize today! The X Prize was offered to "the first non-government team to fly three people, or the equivalent weight, to at least 62 miles in altitude and do it again within two weeks." SpaceShipOne made its first manned flight on June 21, 2004. It completed its first flight for the X Prize attempt successfully on September 29, 2004, and completed its second flight successfully today. Private access to space is now possible.

Update: Google has commemorated the event with its front page graphic:

Help Design CERN's Large Hadron Collider

Coinciding with CERN's 50th anniversary today, the LHC@home distributed computing project has opened to public participation. This project will help CERN design a stable particle beam for its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator. The project uses a software client, based on the BOINC distributed computing platform, to simulate the path of a group of particles around the LHC ring. The client is available for Linux and Windows now, and will be available on other platforms in the future. Since the public will not be able to help analyze the 15 Petabytes of data the LHC will generate each year, LHC@home is a great way for people to participate in the LHC project.

Sony will launch smaller PStwo on October 26

According to a Yahoo! News article, Sony is expected to launch the new PStwo console in the U.S. on October 26. The new console is 30% smaller than the current PlayStation 2, and should retail for the same US$149 price. In other news, Take-Two Interactive has delayed the release of its "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" game by one week to coincide with the launch of the PStwo, inciting Grand Theft Auto fans everywhere to riot. Thanks a lot, Sony!

The original Star Wars movies are now in High Definition

But you won't be able to see them that way for a while. A September 6, 2004 USA Today article describes the digital restoration process the original Star Wars movies have undergone to prepare them for their first release on DVD (on September 21, 2004). Original movie prints get scratch, scuff and dirt damage every time they are copied, and the Star Wars prints were in pretty bad shape. A company called Lowry Digital Images has digitized each frame of the original prints and retouched them using "80 employees and 600 networked Power Mac G5 computers with the equivalent of 378 terabytes (378 million megabytes) of hard-disk storage" to remove the signs of wear and tear, and now "the footage seems to shine, as if brand-new." (I am picturing the brand-new shine of C-3PO at the medal ceremony at the end of Star Wars :-))

Is digital restoration a good thing for classic movies, or does it change them for the worse in some fundamental way, like colorizing black & white movies? It sounds like the good will far outweigh the bad. And George Lucas' editorial changes to scenes in the movies could be far more damaging :-) Hopefully they'll be improvements, like his changes to his first film, THX-1138. I guess we'll see in a week.

Oh, about the High Definition thing: now that the movies are digitized, a High Definition master of them exists, and it can be used to make new film prints and High Definition DVDs.

Genesis augers in

The Genesis return capsule, which was to return particles of the Sun to Earth, has crash landed after its two parachutes failed to deploy. Two helicopter pilots who trained for 6 years to catch the capsule in mid-air, didn't get a chance to catch it as it plummeted to Earth at over 100 MPH. The capsule has been located, at least. A September 5 Wired News article quoted project scientists as saying that if the capsule crashed they would "have to spend months sorting through broken jewelry-studded disks holding the tiny solar wind particles." From this CNN image, it looks like the capsule may be mostly intact, though.

The helicopter recovery was supposed to be the most difficult part of the mission. Who would have thought the parachutes would be the point of failure? But give NASA credit for trying difficult and innovative missions. Without trying, there would be no progress.

MD5 crypto flaw weakens Sun's Solaris Fingerprint Database

The MD5 encryption algorithm, widely used for things like bank Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), bank electronic fund transfers, the Apache web server, Sun's Solaris Fingerprint Database, and creating secure digital signatures, has been cracked. On August 17, four Chinese researchers released a paper detailing a way to exploit flaws in the MD5 algorithm. A distributed computing project, called MD5CRK began 6 months ago, with the goal of proving that the MD5 algorithm is vulnerable. With the project's most recent level of participation, it determined that it might need 200 years to find a collision of points which would defeat the algorithm. But the Chinese researchers' method can find a collision within one hour. A ZDNet article has more information about the reported flaws in MD5.

Sun grid computing will be used to design next generation of nuclear reactors

Nothing illustrates Sun's phrase "The Network Is The Computer" better than grid computing, in which a networked "power grid" of computers acts as a single computer to solve a single, large problem. In the past few years we have read and heard much about the promise of grid computing, but we haven't seen many actual applications of it. I just found a news story, posted today on Yahoo!, which describes an impressive practical application. Sun and the U.S. Department of Energy are creating a computing environment with Sun hardware and Sun's N1 Grid Engine software for the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory to use in designing the Department of Energy's Generation IV nuclear reactors. The 230 Sun Fire(TM) V20z servers in the grid will produce 2 TeraFLOPs/sec (2 trillion floating-point operations per second) of computing power, more than 7 times the power of the INEEL's existing, expensive, custom mainframe computers, and enough to rank "the INEEL datacenter as one of the world's top 150 supercomputing sites."

As a comparison of CPU power, one Intel Pentium 4 2.2 GHz CPU produces about 4400 MegaFLOPs/sec (or 4.4 GigaFLOPs/sec or 0.0044 TeraFLOPs/sec), and SETI@home's network of distributed computers is currently producing 58.8 TeraFLOPs/sec.

Print a 3D model of your climateprediction.net simulation

If you are participating in the climateprediction.net global climate simulation project, and if you are a Windows user with Photoshop, you can now download a Photoshop plug-in to make a 3D globe of your simulation results.

Instead of worrying about a possible future runaway greenhouse effect or the next ice age, you can decorate your office or Christmas tree with it.

Public Invited to Help Catalog Mars

A July 30, 2004, Universe Today article says that NASA will soon start a web-based project which will allow the public to look for interesting geological features in the thousands of Mars images in its archives. NASA will then choose some of these features to study further with its "High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) which will fly on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) in 2005." The project will be hosted on the Marsoweb site.

I wonder if the project will find any evidence of plovers? (2004-08-04 14:04:18.0) Permalink

The Netflix paradox

Every time I visit the Netflix DVD rental site, to see whether a movie I have returned has been received, or to change the order of my rental queue, I invariably find another recommended movie (or two or five) that I want to add to my queue. I try to shorten my queue by watching movies more frequently, but the more movies I watch, the more I visit the website and the longer my queue grows. And if I don't visit the site, I get a movie or movies I'm not in the mood to watch and it takes me longer to get around to watching it, so my queue doesn't shrink. So, the more I try to reduce my movie queue, the longer it grows.

Netflix must have figured out early on that targeted movie recommendations is a good way to keep customers coming back. And Amazon.com figured out years ago that targeted book and other media recommendations is a good way to keep customers buying new books faster than they can read their old ones. It's no coincidence that my (and probably your) bookshelf increasingly contains more books that I'm going to read than books I have read.

Is this just a basic flaw of human nature: the more we have, the more we realize we don't have, and the more we want? It is just greed? Is the Internet accellerating our greed by giving us access to more information?

Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA structure, died today at 88

According to a Yahoo! article, Francis Crick, who co-discovered the double-helix structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA, the building-blocks of almost all life) with James Watson in 1953, died today after a battle with colon cancer. It's hard to believe that DNA was first understood only 51 years ago. Much of modern medicine and molecular biology (and even some computer science) is derived from the work of Crick and Watson.

I first learned about Crick and Watson's work in a great book I read in a college Introduction to Biology class, The Double Helix, by James Watson. First-hand accounts of major scientific discoveries are rare, and well-written, interesting first-hand accounts are even more rare.

If you would like to honor Crick and his work, you can run one of the following non-profit screen-saver distributed computing projects on your workstation or PC to contribute to useful cancer and protein-folding research:

• Parabon Computation - colon cancer research and studies to ease the suffering of chemotherapy recipients
• grid.org - searching for cancer-fighting drugs
• Find-a-Drug - searching for cancer-fighting (and other disease-fighting) drugs
• Distributed Folding - researching how proteins "fold and assemble into living cells"
• Folding@home - researching how proteins self-assemble or fold
• Predictor@home - researching ways to predict protein structures from protein sequences