How to create a Windows XP SP3 installation disk

All right, windows XP service pack 3 comes out (you can wait until the official final release or find a download link in my previous blog). Now, if you have an old Windows XP installation CD, for instance, I have one XP HOME SP2 with my laptop, you can make a new SP3 installation CD without the hassles to go over the update procedure.

Procedures:
1) copy all files in the original installation to hard drive, for instance, C:\XPSETUP
2) download the sp3. Let's say the name is sp3.exe
3) in a terminal command prompt( for instance, by running cmd from Start->Run...), run
"sp3.exe /integrate:C:\XPSETUP"
4) find a boot disk for windows XP, for instance, w2ksect.bin in wxp10.zip. (OK, this one doesn't work. Another method is to download ISO buster and use it to extract the bootdisk image from the original installation CD.)
5) in C:\XPSETUP, you may notice files names "WIN51", "WIN51IC.SP2". Make a copy of "WIN51IC.SP2" and rename it to "WIN51IC.SP3".(it actually has been automatically created by the integrate process!)
6) burn CD with your favorite burning software. For instance, I use Nero. Create a bootable CD, set the boot image file, create a label like WXPSP3HOME, pick data mode 1, ISO9660+Joliet, move all contents in C:\XPSETUP to the target CD project. And, burn!

Windows XP service pack 3

Microsoft has delayed the release of XP SP3 to end users (as April 29). The reason: "InfoWorld blogger Randall Kennedy insinuates that Microsoft is delaying Window XP SP3 to talk up the release of Windows Vista SP1. Kennedy believes Microsoft is showing its true colors by trying to salvage a fledgling product instead of releasing a much-needed rollout to its loyal customers."

Yet, there is a direct link for downloading SP3 leaked, named windowsxp-kb936929-sp3-x86-enu_c81472f7eeea2eca421e116cd4c03e2300ebfde4.exe. According to microsoft website, kb936929 is Release Candidate 3 version. I　ｂｅｌｉｅｖｅ　ｔｈｉｓ　ｉｓ　ｔｈｅ　ｆｉｎａｌ　ｒｅｌｅａｓｅ　ｖｅｒｓｉｏｎ．　

OK, I have downloaded and installed it on my laptop. It was smooth and no problems met. Indeed,　Ｉ can feel the computer runs faster than before. So, upgrading to SP3 is highly recommendated.

Build lapack with gfortran

Procedures to build lapack for a Linux x86_64 system with gfortran

1. download the source package from netlib.org: lapack.tgz
2. in a working directory, use "tar zxvf lapack.tgz" to unpack.
   
3. "cd lapack-3.1.1"
4. "cp INSTALL/make.inc.LINUX ./make.inc"
5. edit the file make.inc, change the compiler g77 to gfortran
6. "make blaslib"
   
7. "make lib"
8. if you want to compile and run the rest routines, run "make all"
9. copy the generated library files *.a into a directory where you keep lib files, for instance $(HOME)/lib

Tablet PC, your next laptop!

First things first, the tablet PC is the destiny! Imagine this,

• You can hold a LCD just as holding a book, reading articles, surfing webs just with your fingers.
  
• Taking notes on your computers, especially, with heavy math formula, chemical symbols, musical notes, or any graphical objects.
  
• Giving interactive lectures or presentations: you can write on a computer(via a projector) the same way that you write on a blackboard, while you can pull out any multimedia objects for demonstration.
  
• Painting on LCD screens just as painting on papers.
  
• Listening to music or watching movies the same way you are using an IPOD touch

If you have ever thought about any of these, you want a tablet PC. Actually, after using a Nokia N770 tablet(with a 4in touchscreen) for a couple of months, I got tired of keyboard.

With the invention of active digitizer(compared with the conventional passive digitizer relying on pressures), writing on computers are much more easier and with much better accuracy. Buy Wacom stocks! (Can anybody tell me how I can buy stocks from Japanese stock market directly?)

Tablet PCs usually cost around $2000, beyond the reach for normal users. HP has introduced a budget tablet PC, tx2000 series (from the modification of the previous 1000 series). You can purchase a tx2110US model for $899 at Office depot this week. So, I believe the hardware cost is already within the range, and I believe by the end of this year, every PC manufacturers will have their budget tablet PC models. But the question is, whether the software companies are ready?

My comments:

• Apple has already successfully introduced the touchscreen on iPhone and done many good things. I am looking forward to the Mac Tablet: 1) Apple appears to have the ability to do things right. For example, there were already so many manufacturers for MP3 players before IPOD but none can be compared with IPOD. 2) Apple's "imaginative" realization that, you can use two fingers to magnify or shrink the screen. Yes, we (most) have ten fingers, which should be much more flexible than a mouse. I believe that the next patent will be filed on using more fingers and the combination of fingers and a digital pen.
  
• Microsoft is everywhere. Unfortunately, perfection is what it lacks. It already has several softwares for touchscreens and digitizer pens, such as Math journal( it's free, which is a rare thing for Microsoft). But they are just usable. Come on, do something better than that! Don't wait until Apple has done it again!
• Tablets will greatly affect the orgnization of web pages and web applications. They will be more "finger"-friendly, at least, some bigger touchable items for easy browsing with fingers.

How to build a budget Linux cluster for scientific computation

Linux clusters have become the trend for scientific computations replacing the old style supercomputers. (Grid-computing is another way).

Here I share my recent experience in building a budget linux cluster, with

Hardware:

• CPU: Intel Quad Core Q6600 (2.4GHz) , ~$300 with motherboard combo sale at fry's. It is expected that Intel will cut the price soon and Q9450 would be a better choice. I would not recommend AMD opetrons and Intel Xeon series as they are overpriced, unless 1) you are running enterprise servers and seeking better stabilities; 2) you want to install more than 8G memory on each node.
  
• Motherboard: I used ECS GM-33T which includes onboard gigabit network adaptor and video card and supports 4 DIMM memories up to 8G. Pay attention to that current motherboard chipsets only support unbuffered non-ECC memory up to 8G( a variation of NVidia chipset can support 16G, but there are no 4G/DIMM memory on the market). But GM-33T doesnot allow overclocking Q6600 as this CPU is not designed for overclocking. However, there are reports that with another motherboard, one can overclock Q6600 to 3.4GHz without generating any overheat or causing any system instability.
  
• Memory: I installed 4x2G DDR2-667 memories dimms, which cost around $160-200 at fry's.
• Hard disk: 320G SATA disk costs $70 at fry's which is adequate for a node. For the headnode, you can pick, for instance, a 1TB for $200, or two of them for backup.
  
• Case: I picked a $35 PC case. If you want to save space, you can buy a rackmount case which is available for $200(for instance, 2U).
  
• Network: if you don't have heavy parallel jobs, a gigabit ethernet connection is adequate. Since the motherboard already has an onboard ethernet adaptor, you only have to purchase an extra network adaptor for the master node(for connection to WAN) and a gigabit network switch(the number of ports depends on how many nodes you are building).
  
• DVD drives are optional, as you can always connect an external one when installing the operating system.
  

Software:

• Operating system: I picked Fedora Core 8 x86_64 for the available software packages and amazing promptness of software updates. Of course, you can pick any one of your favor. For instance, CentOS(same as RedHat Enterprise server), SuSE, Ubuntu, Debian ...
  
• Clustering software: I picked OSCAR (open source clustering application resources), which includes almost everything you will need for scientific computation, for instance, job scheduling(open-pbs, maui), parallel envionment(MPI, LAM). The latest release version (5.0) only supports Fedora Core up to 5 . However, there are nightly builds for newer versions of Linux http://oscar.openclustergroup.org/filebrowser/49/branch. In my installation with FC8, I find a lot of problems. If you are not very confident about your Linux skills, please go with Fedora Core 5 or CentOS 4, and intall the released version of OSCAR. Of course, you may face the problem that the old version Linux may miss the device drivers for your new computers. But I judge that it's easier.
• Compiler: MPI compilers come with OSCAR is adequate. For single-node computations, Intel C++/Fortran compiler is free for non-comercial purposes. It's much better than GNU compilers.
  
• I will blog later on the details of software installation.
  

Summary, by my choice , the master node costs $800 while $600 for each node. A 16 nodes(with 64 computing CPUs) cluster costs only a little above $10,000. Several programs are tested and each node is more powerful than a HP Proliant server(with 2 dual-core AMD opetron 2218), and is 10-20% slower than an Intel Xeon X5450(that one runs at 3GHz compared to 2.4GHz of Q6600). Unbelievable? Try it out!

How to change the default paper size in LaTeX

The default paper size coming with every latex system, including MikTex, teTex, Mac versions is A4. If you want to change it to letter, please follow these steps,

• If you are using an old version(not pdfetex), or, you are still using dvips, dvipdf to create ps(pdf) files, you need to change the following files.
  For dvips, edit $TEX/texmf/dvips/config/config.ps, find
  

  @ A4size 594.99bp 841.99bp
  @+ ! %%DocumentPaperSizes: a4
  @+ %%PaperSize: A4

  you can either comment them by adding % in front of the lines, or move these lines behind the letterSize section.
  For dvipdf, edit $TEX/texmf/dvipdfm/config/config, find
  

  % Set default paper size here
  p a4

  change a4 to letter
• If you are using pdflatex, depending on the specific version of TeX, you will need to edit either $TEX/texmf/pdftex/config/pdftex.cfg or $TEX/texmf/tex/generic/config/pdftexconfig.tex. Change pagewidth to 8.5 true in; pageheight to 11 true in.
  However, I found for some systems, manual changes don't work! In these cases, you should run texconfig (or similar configuration program in MikTeX, gwTeX) to change the default paper size. It will create a personal configuration file in your home directory.

Intel Fortran Compiler: Selinux and libifcore.so.5 conflict

Intel fortran 10.1 (not tested on other versions) has one bug:
if you compile with the option "ifort -O3 -xT -mcmodel=medium -shared-intel xxxx.f90", the executable will have a problem : "./a.out: error while loading shared libraries: /opt/intel/fce/10.1.008/lib/libifcore.so.5: cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied.

This is due to that SELinux has disabled the use of shared libraries with text relocation. The solutions are 1) to disable SELinux, 2) for the specific lib, for instance, libifcore.so.5, use "chcon -t textrel_shlib_t /opt/intel/fce/10.1.008/lib/libifcore.so.5".