Free computing software for linux

MPICH (MVAPICH2) software delivers best performance, scalability and fault tolerance for high-end computing systems and servers using InfiniBand, iWARP and other RDMA-enabled interconnect networking technologies. This software is being used by more than 540 organizations world-wide (Current Users) to extract the potential of these emerging networking technologies for modern systems. This software is also being distributed by many InfiniBand, iWARP and RDMA-enabled interconnect vendors in their software distributions. MVAPICH and MVAPICH2 are also available with Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) stack.
MVAPICH software is powering several supercomputers in the TOP 500 list. Examples (from the June 07 ranking) include:
- 15th, 5848-core Dell PowerEdge Intel EM64T 2.66 GHz cluster at Texas Advanced Computing Center/Univ. of Texas
- 19th, 9216-core Appro Quad Opteron dual Core 2.4 GHz at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
- 71st, 2200-processors Apple Xserve 2.3 GHz cluster at Virginia Tech
Enhancements:
- New message coalesing, hot-spot avoidance, application-initiated systems-level checkpointing, APM support, multi-rail support for iWARP, on-demand connection management for iWARP and uDAPL (including Solaris), RDMA read, and blocking support.
- The software was also updated to MPICH2 1.0.5p4.

MPICH2 is a robust and flexible implementation of the MPI (Message Passing Interface). Message Passing Interface is often used with parallel or distributed computing projects.

MPICH2 is a multi-platform, configurable system (development, execution, libraries, etc) for MPI. It can acheive parallelism using networked machines or using mulitasking on a single machine.

KDE is a powerful Free Software graphical desktop environment for Linux and Unix workstations.

It combines ease of use, contemporary functionality, and outstanding graphical design with the technological superiority of the Unix operating system.

KDE is a network transparent contemporary desktop environment for UNIX workstations. KDE seeks to fill the need for an easy to use desktop for Unix workstations, similar to the desktop environments found under the MacOS or Microsoft Windows.

We believe that the UNIX operating system is the best operating system available today. In fact UNIX has been the undisputed choice of the information technology professional for many years. When it comes to stability, scalability and openness there is no competition to UNIX. However, the lack of an easy to use contemporary desktop environment for UNIX has prevented UNIX from finding its way onto the desktops of the typical computer user in offices and homes.

UNIX dominates the server market and is the preferred computing platform for computing professional and scientists. Without UNIX the internet would not be. But UNIX did not address the needs of the average computer user.

This fact is particularly unfortunate since a number of implementations of UNIX (Debian GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD etc.) are freely available on the internet. All of which are of exceptional quality and stability.

KDE The Desktop Environment

With KDE there is now an easy to use contemporary desktop environment available for UNIX. Together with a free implementation of UNIX such as GNU/Linux, UNIX/KDE constitutes a completely free and open computing platform available to anyone free of charge including its source code for anyone to modify. While there will always be room for improvement we believe to have delivered a viable alternative to some of the more commonly found and commercial operating systems/desktops combinations available today. It is our hope that the combination UNIX/KDE will finally bring the same open, reliable, stable and monopoly free computing to the average computer user that scientist and computing professionals world-wide have enjoyed for years.

KDE The Application Development Framework

Authoring applications under UNIX/X11 used to be an extremely difficult and tedious process. KDE recognizes the fact that a computing platform is only as good as the amount of first class applications available to the users of that particular platform. In view of these circumstances the KDE Project has developed a first rate compound document application framework, implementing the latest advances in framework technology and thus positioning itself in direct competition to such popular development frameworks as for example Microsofts MFC/COM/ActiveX technology. KDEs KParts compound document technology enables developers to quickly create first rate applications implementing cutting edge technology.

KDE The Office Application Suite

Leveraging the KDE application development framework a great number of applications have been built for the K Desktop Environment. A selection of those applications is contained in the KDE base distribution. At this moment KDE is developing an office application suite based on KDEs KParts technology consisting of a spread-sheet, a presentation application, an organizer, a news client and more. KPresenter, KDEs presentation application was successfully used at many presentations.

LinuxBIOS project is aimed at replacing the normal BIOS with a little bit of hardware initialization and a compressed Linux kernel that can be booted from a cold start.
The project was started as part of clustering research work in the Cluster Reseach Lab at the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The primary motivation behind the project was the desire to have the operating system gain control of a cluster node from power on.
Other beneficial consequences of using LinuxBIOS include needing only two working motors to boot (cpu fan and power supply), fast boot times (current fastest is 3 seconds), and freedom from proprietary (buggy) BIOS code, to name a few.
These secondary benefits are numerous and have helped gain support from many vendors in both the high performance computing as well as embedded computing markets.
Note that, on newer systems, there need be no moving parts at all. At LANL, we are building a new no moving parts 16-node cluster to demonstrate this capability. The cluster will fit in a toolbox, run from a battery, boot in 10 seconds, and be controlled from your laptop (which, sadly, will still have a few moving parts).
Enhancements:
- This release adds preliminary support for M50FW040, M29W040B, M50FLW040A, M50FLW040B, M50FLW080A, M50FLW080B, M50FW080, M50FW016, M50LPW116, and M29W010B (all by ST) to flash ROM.

PyEphem project provides scientific-grade astronomical computations for the Python programming language.
Given an arbitrary date and location on Earth, it can compute the positions of the sun, moon, and planets as well as any asteroids, comets, or earth satellites whose orbital elements the user can provide.
There are additional functions for computing the angular separation between two objects in the sky, determining the constellation in which an object lies, and finding the times at which an object rises, transits, and sets on a particular day.
Enhancements:
- PyEphem should now compile cleanly under Windows.
- The underlying astronomy library has also been upgraded to the latest version.

Bio::Location::CoordinatePolicyI is an abstract interface for objects implementing a certain policy of computing integer-valued coordinates of a Location.

SYNOPSIS

# get a location, e.g., from a SeqFeature
$location = $feature->location();
# examine its coordinate computation policy
print "Location of feature ", $feature->primary_tag(), " employs a ",
ref($location->coordinate_policy()),
" instance for coordinate computationn";
# change the policy, e.g. because the user chose to do so
$location->coordinate_policy(Bio::Location::NarrowestCoordPolicy->new());

Objects implementing this interface are used by Bio::LocationI implementing objects to determine integer-valued coordinates when asked for it. While this may seem trivial for simple locations, there are different ways to do it for fuzzy or compound (split) locations. Classes implementing this interface implement a certain policy, like always widest range, always smallest range, mean for BETWEEN locations, etc. By installing a different policy object in a Location object, the behaviour of coordinate computation can be changed on-the-fly, and with a single line of code client-side.

Compute Portal Project is a portal project to produce a web based front end to a compute resource, such as a cluster, using PHP, mysql, and apache.
The intent is to allow non-programmers to use complex programs through an intuitive interface.
Enhancements:
- This is the third attempt to create a working release with an install script.
- The last two releases were plagued with copy and paste errors.
- This release is strictly a bugfix release that has been tested in a production environment.
- There may still be residual problems from the 0.8.8 to 0.8.9 transition that included the first install script and moved several directory locations.
- Please give this release a try.