Category Archives: Tech Buzz - Page 2

Will The GPU Replace The CPU Or Will It Be The Other Way Around?

Posted by on March 9, 2010 3 comments

The Significance of GPU has sky rocked to a level that its even required for running an Operating System. Windows Vista made this impact and made GPU more significant, which was otherwise required for only gaming and video editing. Nowadays  every user not only looks at CPU and Memory configuration, the GPU is also considered with equally importance. Even thought  the use of dedicated GPU is limited its fast rising.

Intel’s plans to introduce its new architecture, Sandy Bridge, which has 2 integrated GPU’s and that run at about 1-1.4Ghz may be a challenge for the GPU developers. Even though  these may not seem so dangerous for now. Intel’s plans to improve it much higher grade in the future.

Intel wanted to  integrate all the computation into a single device which was the CPU. GPU was introduced to give some extra bandwidth for image processing. And now with the introduction of Intel’s Nehalam processor and GPGPU, things have have become a bit interesting for whom is to survive this race. GPU has replaced the CPU in many roles which was otherwise performed by the CPU. The power to price ratio of CPU is no where near that of the GPU, even though a GPU is capable of doing computation limited to vectors it may be such that such developments may significantly decrease the role of CPU to a drastic level. CPU will be limited to do just the basic computation purpose and the rest may be done by the GPU. There will be time when we may ask “Whats the specs of your GPU?”, instead of asking for the CPU.

It may seem clear to say that the GPU will rise over CPU, but Intel’s proposed new Larrabee architecture has raised hope for intel to power its graphic power and compete with the GPU vendors in the future. Its not a question of who will survive? But its a question who will dominate?


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From Central-Processing on the CPU to Co-Processing on CPU & GPU with Nvidia’s CUDA Architecture.

Technical Procedure To Set Up the Virtual Supercomputer

Posted by on March 9, 2010 2 comments

Hope you have read about the Overview on setting up Virtual Computer Using Boinc.

So now I will explain the technical details behind setting up of a super computer in the academic campus.

There are four main steps involved in this:

  • Setting up a BOINC server.
  • Creating grid of trusted nodes.
  • Setting up volunteer computing segment.
  • Integration and Finalization.

    1) Setting up BOINC server:

    We need a server dedicated to manage the virtual super computer. Intel dual Xeon or AMD Opteron will be a nice choice. Internet connection should be reliable and server must have a static IP. At least 2 GB of RAM, and 40 GB of free disk space, UPS power supply, RAID disk configuration, hot-swappable spares, temperature-controlled machine room, etc and do everything  to make it secure. A midrange server computer like dell poweredge will do. Put the entire system behind a firewall. Switch of ports like ftp and telnet that are not in use.

    Software requirements:

    • VMware Player
    • BOINC Server Virtual Machine

    VMware Player is a freeware virtualization software product from VMware, Inc. (vmware.com). The player can run virtual machines, ie, it will create a virtual environment in the system. For example you can virtually run windows in Linux or vice versa provided you have appropriate virtual machines. You can download the BOINC server virtual machine from boinc.berkely.edu. Download and run the BOINC VM(847MB) in VMware player in the server to get started.

    So now that we have a server with BOINC virtual machine running on it, its time to move on to the grid creation part.

    2) Creating grid of trusted nodes

    Although BOINC was originally designed for volunteer computing, it can be configured to work for grid computing.

    The steps in creating a BOINC-based grid are:

    • Modify preferences of workunit (computation to be performed) from th BOINC server to disable redundant processing. Since a grid will contain only trusted nodes, redundancy is not necessary.
    • Create an account with the general preferences enforced for the desktop grid. Clients can be remotely monitored and controlled if necessary.
    • Configure project to disable account creation. New account creation is for the volunteer computing segment and we do not require it here.
    • Create a custom installer that includes the desired configuration files.
    • Deploy the installer in each system in the lab and other trusted computers.

    So now we have setup each the node in grid segment. Note that our Economic virtual campus supercomputing facility combines the benefits of both Desktop grid computing and volunteer computing. We connect the trusted systems (like lab) to the desktop grid part and other non trusted (student laptops and misc PCs) system to the volunteer computing segment. Now we move to setup the volunteer computing segment.

    3) Creating the volunteer computing segment

    As BOINC is specially designed for volunteer computing, much change is not necessary to be made to BOINC client.

    Following similar procedure setup another custom installer with

    • Account creation enabled
    • Redundancy set up to a desired value
    • Other preference parameters setup to suit specific needs.
    • Ask students and faculty to install this custom client.

    4) Integration and Finalization

    Connect systems to form, desktop grid. Let lab systems be ON whenever computing power is desired. Distribute the volunteer client to all non- trusted units in VCSF ( Eg: Student laptops). Let them connect when they power on their systems. The whole network is connected by wired or Wi-Fi LAN.

    THE CLIENT SIDE

    The volunteers who are ready to contribute to the project should be aware of their CPU usage of BOINC.

    First pic is the screen shot of CPU usage of my system before installing BOINC. The average CPU usage of your computer will be less than 20% approximate in windows vista and less than 5% in windows XP. Since this processor idle time is used for processing supercomputing tasks this will rise up.

    Second shows the CPU usage graph after installing BOINC.  You can notice that the CPU usage rise to 100%. I was contributing my CPU to SETI@home project, the search for extra terrestrial intelligence.

    Get ready for Next-Gen Controller free gaming with Project Natal

    Posted by on March 8, 2010 No comments

    Xbox 360 . Controller Free Gaming . Project Natal

    Don’t hesitate to play just because you are not familiar with your controllers. Do you have the real life experience in doing the same? Then that would be more than enough when the new revolutionary gaming technology codenamed Project NATAL is released by Microsoft. So rather than just playing FIFA with your controllers you could just get on to the field and start dribbling with your ball.

    When Tom Cruise aka John Anderton in the Minority Report used a computer by waving his hands in the air, the world never expected the creator behind this film Steven Spielberg has really got to do something with the new Controller Free Gaming. Now when Project Natal has been announced by Microsoft, reports have been confirmed that Steven Spielberg is being a part of it.

    The Next-Gen Controller Gaming Experience to be offered by Microsoft for Xbox 360 video game  platform. With Project Natal *addons* to your Xbox 360, you can just Fire at your enemy or Kick the ball without the need to touch the controllers. So it has got voice recognition, 3D motion capture and face recognition made possible with no hand held conrollers or wires. To be released as Christmas present for the Gamers from Microsoft, it has been one of the most widely awaited products of Microsoft. Steven Spielberg did meant it when he was quoted saying “This is a pivotal moment that will carry with it a wave of change, the ripples of which will reach far beyond video games”.

    Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard, Bethesda Softworks, Disney Interactive, Electronic Arts are just a few among the Top Game Creators who account for more than 70 percent of third-party software sales has accorded their support for this revolutionary gaming Technology.

    For more updates regarding Project Natal check out http://www.projectnatalgamer.com/

    FOOBAR2000: The Damn Small Audio Player

    Posted by on March 7, 2010 1 comment

    The name foobar is derived from a common meta-syntactic variable name used in computer programming. Foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for windows, it has highly modular design and extensive SDK which allows third-party developers to customize even change the interface. The core structure is closed source but the SDK is under BSD license. Foobar2000 is very small in size and includes many tools like tagging and audio conversion and all this and more at merely a size of 3MB. Many other audio players more than double the size wont offer such features. Foobar2000 increases audio fidelity using noise shaping and dithering. Ask anyone if they have opened a 7z file with an audio player, well Foobar2000 does that with no problems, all you need is an addon.

    The Main Feature of Foobar are:

    • Audio formats supported natively: MP1, MP2, MP3, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC / Ogg FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CDDA, WMA, and more.
    • Full Unicode support.
    • Customizable user interface .
    • Advanced tagging capabilities.
    • Support for ripping Audio CDs as well as transcoding all supported audio formats with command line support.
    • ReplayGain support – both playback and calculation.
    • Gapless playback support.
    • Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
    • Media Library with automated folder watching.
    • Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player.
    • Embedded support for album list, album art, spectrum visualization.
    • Metadata support and file organization.

    Moreover Additional components can be added providing more support

    • APE, ALAC support.
    • Playback statistics.
    • Kernel streaming support.
    • ASIO support.
    • WASAPI output support.
    • CD burning support.
    • Ability to open archives (7z, RAR, ZIP ).

    Foobar2000 is a must for all music fans out there. So Check it out.

    Screenshots:

    Download

    Plus there are additional components here.

    There are also skins available here.

    Or If you are interested in developing additional tools download the SDK here.

    So Have fun with Foobar2000.

    XBMC:The Full-Fledged Media Centre

    Posted by on March 5, 2010 No comments

    XBMC (Formely Known as Xbox Media Center) is basically a free and open source cross platform media centre to suit all your media needs. It is written in C and using some python. Comes with a large codec support so that you can play all your media files with ease. It outperforms the default media center. A lot of plugins and addons like BBC player, Radio, ESPN makes XBMC more additive. Using XBMC makes you forget all about the Operating System that is siting ideal, such that they are providing it as Live CD and Live USB.

    XBMC has greater basic hardware requirements than a traditional 2D software applications, this basically means that it needs 3D capable GPU graphics hardware controller for all rendering; on the other hand, powerful 3D GPU chips are common today in most modern computers. It even plays pure 1080p media files using a core 2 duo processor using only the CPU power. Hardware accelerated video decoding using VDPAU is supported in XBMC 9.04 (and later) under Linux on Nvidia graphics hardware.

    You can make a cool library by adding covers, description, fanart etc. It moreover supports network playback so you can stream media anywhere in your house or from the net using practically any protocol available.

    XBMC is used as a application framework platform for others projects to base their media center software on, and today at least Boxee, MediaPortal, Plex, and Voddler are separate derivative products that are all known to initially have copied the GUI and media player parts of their software from XBMC’s source code.

    XBMC features a Python Scripts Engine and WindowXML application framework (a XML-based widget toolkit for creating a GUI for widgets) in a similar to Apple Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets and Microsoft Gadgets in Windows Sidebar. Plugin scripts like Internet-TV and movie-trailer browsers, weather forecast, TV-guides, e-mail clients, instant messaging, scripts to front-end control PVR software and hardware, Internet-radio-station browsers, P2P file-sharing downloaders, IRC, also casual games such as Tetris, Snake, Space Invaders, Sudoku, and much more.

    XBMC is distributed as a GPL and is developed by a global community, so there is lot to offer. Moreover it doesn’t require a high-end PC making it is easy to build a Economical HTPC. If you want a HTPC you got to have XBMC, The Ultimate one. The difficult to put all the feature of XBMC in words, to know it ,you got to experience it.

    XBMC supports a lot of platforms, namely Windows, Mac, Linux, Apple TV and there are also Live versions.

    Download

    and also dont forget to check out skins and plugins.

    here is a site dedicated for all plugins and scripts.

    Setting Up a Virtual Supercomputer Using BOINC

    Posted by on March 5, 2010 7 comments

    Campuses have always been the places of innovation. The presence of of a super computing facility in a campus can greatly aid in R&D associated with the campus. The students will get an exposure to super computing arena and they can contribute to indigenous projects.

    But what if we can setup such a facility using the computers already present in the campus with no extra investment??? And what if the  implementation do not induce any bottleneck in the proper functioning of those computers. Well it was a project we where working on..for quiet a long time… So that we can setup a virtual supercomputing facility in a campus in a cost effective way..which uses the unused processing power of all computers present in the campus.

    We have derived the idea of implementation from grid and volunteer computing notions. For those not so tech-savvy people who may stumble across these lines, Grid computing is a variant of distributed computing. Lets say someone has a very complex, resource draining program and a dozen computers. He designs the program in a such a manner that he could divide it into pieces of program each running autonomously in one of the computers and giving the same solution as if we used a very powerful computer with the the high capabilities the program demanded. So GRID computing is called a distributed computing form with loosely coupled (the computers will not have to communicate with each other in solving a problem assigned to them), Heterogenous (computers can be of diffrent forms,using diffrent latforms etc..) and geographically dispersed.

    In volunteer computing any person with his mind bent a bit (towards the side of greater human cause) can donate a part of their pc’s computational power as a service. Many data intensive projects like the SETI@home runs on volunteer computing with people all around the world participating in it.

    So in a campus we have the computers in labs as well as those in the hands of students. Using an Open Source  middle ware called BOINC we can pool the unused processing power of all these computers. Here we will be using something like cycle stealing where idle processor cycles will be nicked from the participating nodes to setup the required virtual super computer.

    The concept in its essence is similar to a volunteer computing project but essentially the BOINC middle ware should be adapted to perform in a smaller arena with the maximum number of nodes being 200 or 300. For this we developed some changes to  the original BOINC as such like the development of a hierarchal tree searching technique, development of an IDS(Intrusion Detection System) etc..

    I have tried to outline the basic concepts of this implementation in a not-so-techie manner. In the next post i will outline the technical procedure to setup the same in a campus and more details on the changes we made to BOINC s/w..

    And for those techie guys who i am sure will be bit disappointed after skimming through this – BOINC stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure For Network Computing. It is an architecture developed by David Anderson to support GRID based projects.It is available in open source..thanks to those great minds.. And it is this middle-ware which integrates various nodes present in the virtual supercomputing facility, enabling them to interact with each other and manage multiple work modules…

    Technical Procedure To Set Up the Virtual Supercomputer