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wrf Asgard :: 0 comments
~wrf by Bill Fraser
February 11th, 2010 at 11:32 AM
The new machine is complete!

Asgard:
  • Intel Core i7 920, overclocked to 3500 MHz

  • EVGA X58 SLI LE motherboard

  • BFG GeForce GTX 275 OC video card

  • 6GB DDR3-1600 7-7-7-20 Corsair RAM

  • 30GB Patriot SSD

  • 3x 500GB Seagate 7200RPM drives in RAID 5

  • Cooler Master V8 CPU cooler

  • 750W Antec power supply

  • Cooler Master ATCS 840 aluminum full tower case



And then, just for giggles I got a new monitor and stereo:
  • Hanns-G 25.4" 1920x1080 LCD

  • Polk Audio Monitor 30 bookshelf speakers

  • Polk Audio 10" subwoofer



This machine is fast like woah. This is the most top-of-the-line machine I've ever owned, and damn it feels good to be able to run literally any game at full resolution with all the goodies turned on. I can run Lightroom, Photoshop, Chrome with a hundred tabs open, and watch blu-ray resolution video all at the same time with no …

wrf New Skin, New Classes :: 0 comments
~wrf by Bill Fraser
January 26th, 2010 at 3:39 AM
Yeah, new skin. Same layout as the old skin but not red, and not fixed-width font. I'm not sure I like this better, but it does have some nice improvements.

So, a new semester is upon me. With work and all, I'm taking a lighter courseload -- just 14 hours of classes:
  • CS 440: Software Engineering I
  • CS 473: Compiler Design
  • ECON 121: Macroeconomics
  • EAES 101: Intro to Earth Science


CS 440 is more about diagrams and documentation than programming, which might suck. Other than that, it's like CS 340, but in groups. Same prof even (John Bell for those who know). One big project that matures over the semester. When I took 340, I ended up with a 6000 line Java and C++ adventure game program, which subsequently went on my resume and helped me get my current …

wrf Semi-Scientific Filesystem Comparison :: 0 comments
~wrf by Bill Fraser
January 12th, 2010 at 6:34 PM
System: Dual Pentium III (Coppermine) @ 1000 MHz / 133 MHz FSB, 2 GiB ECC SDRAM. Linux 2.6.32-ARCH.
Disks: four 10,000 RPM UltraSCSI 320 disks in RAID5 (hardware accelerated). Max read speed: ~50 MB/s. Max write speed: ~35 MB/s
Setup: filesystems created on a 10 GiB (10737418240 bytes) zero-filled file, mounted via loop device.

Test 1: unpack an uncompressed tar archive of the Chromium browser source code at revision 35890 (2.6 GiB, 222964 files) to the test filesystem.
Test 2: delete all files created in test 1.

(Note: CPU usage is out of 200%, and the loop device and tar command make up a large part of it)

JFS Test 1: 3:25.85, 32% CPU
JFS Test 2: 0:22.38, 64% CPU

XFS Test 1: 4:22.26, 43% CPU
XFS Test 2: 1:16.31, 89% CPU

Ext4 Test 1: 3:28.61, 28% CPU
Ext4 Test 2: 0:24.12, 72% CPU

ReiserFS Test 1: 4:28.20, 39% CPU
ReiserFS Test 2: 0:33.93, 91% CPU

So, JFS wins this one, which is good, because that's what filesystem I'm already using. :)

Test …

wrf Re: An Interesting Processor Comparison :: 0 comments
~wrf by Bill Fraser
October 10th, 2009 at 4:33 AM
Aha. Figured out why the AthlonXP beats the pants off the Core Duo.

Too many processes.

The Core Duo seems to be much slower at creating new processes, which my test method did a lot of.

Also, with the fact that so many short-lived processes are flying around, and therefore being shuttled back and forth between the two cores, these cores' caches probably aren't being used very well, causing even more slowdown.

In the end, I rewrote my processing shell scripts as one program (a PHP script :P), and the processing time on the Core Duo went from 20 minutes down to a few seconds. Clearly, the new-process overhead is significant. The other machines saw similar improvements, to the point where I can't really tell which machine is fastest, because the script runs so fast.

wrf An Interesting Processor Comparison :: 0 comments
~wrf by Bill Fraser
October 9th, 2009 at 11:22 PM
My latest Computer Science assignment involved a large amount of number crunching and text processing, and seeing as how I have a large assortment of computers around my apartment, I figured I'd try them all out and see how they stacked up. The results proved quite surprising.

The data I needed to process was a large text file (10680 lines), where each line had a source IP address, a destination IP address, and various network statistics. I wrote two scripts to process this: the first took each IP address, looked it up in a file that mapped IPs to latitude-longitude pairs (816 lines long), and printed lines with the address substituted for the location. The second script took these two locations and calculated the distance on the globe between them.

Script #1, for each input line, grep'd the ip-location map twice (once for source, once for dest), and printed the new line with the IPs substituted for locations.

Script #2, for each line, ran a perl script that used the …


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