After Advanced Computer Architecture and Parallel Processing, I’m going to review another book from the same serie. As the title hints it, the goal of this book is to introduce the tools that may be used in parallel, grid and distributed computing. This is the layer above the architecture the last book presented.
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This is my first review. I read this book some time ago but I still want to write about it because the topic is very interesting.
In March 2008 issue, IEEE Computers published a case study on large-scale parallel scientific code development. I’d like to comment this article, a very good one in my mind.
Five research centers were analyzed, or more precisely their development tool and process. Each center did a research in a peculiar domain, but they seem share some Computational Fluid Dynamics basis.
This week, I’ve updated my blog engine and I’m using WordPress now.
Why ? Because it is a real blog engine, there is a huge community that writes a lot of useful plugins (syntax highlighters, sitemaps, …) but mainly, it allows me to specify multiple categories when I’m posting, and this was needed for some blog aggregators (O’ Reilly, planet.scipy.org, …).
The theme is almost the same as the last one, everything is not yet available (like everything that was on my blogroll), but it will be back soon 🙂
In my lab, we frequently process huge amounts of data, each process can take hours or days. The problem is that we don’t have a usable tool to do this.
Our legacy software is in C and we plan on moving to Python in the next weeks. We could use some commercial software, but it is not optimal.
This is where P2P comes into the game. We have a lot of unused computers or dual cores that are not used even at 50% because we are not trained in parallel computing (and we won’t in the near future). By “we”, I mainly mean PhD students. Our background is signal or image processing, not Computer Science and even less parallel computing. Those unused computers could be used for our computations, but this implies that the computer is only used if nobody works on it, that we only use what is available at a precise moment, and that some computers may get used during the computations. That’s why P2P seems an elegant idea, as a grid computing tool.
P2P computation is not new in the lab (we developed P2P-MPI in Java for instance), but for our team, it is. For the time being, I did not find much about the tools that we could use, but the JXTA protocol seems a good start. I hope I will be able to talk more about this subject in the near future.
Today ships my first book on Python for the scientists. Although IT people can learn a lot of Python with it (mainly if they are working in labs are research centers), scientists will be more interested as it presents a viable alternative to Matlab : fast, efficient, a real language with a large standard library.
After an introduction, the Python language is exposed as well as some main modules. The three central chapters are dedicated to Numpy, Scipy and Matplotlib. Each library tackles a specific problem, storing data, using it or display it. Finally, the last chapter exposes ways of speeding up Python with the use of C or C++.
The link to my publisher : here
After some thoughts, I’ve decided to create my new English blog. I already have a French one, on http://blog.developpez.com/index.php?blog=92, but now I feel I need to have an English one.
Currently, I’ve doing a PhD thesis in Strasbourg, France, with the Python language mainly, although some work is done in C++. It tackles the complicated problem of manifold learning, I hope I will have some concrete results soon !
My passions, besides CS (I’m a geek :()) is music (I’m a trumpet player, a drummer and a bassist) playing or playing with music. That is, I love mixing music, creating new tools for music or acoustics, …
I hope you will enjoy this blog 😉