Step by step guide for the installation and configuration of a cluster (with Rocks) to run ParaView

We have recently installed a small test cluster to run ParaView visualization software in parallel. The configuration was not trivial, and I put a detailed step-by-step guide in SIEpedia, in case it can be of interest to someone else. Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

IDL (Virtual Machine) and Condor

At our place we have a nice Condor environment set up, and many people use IDL. Until now, our use of IDL with Condor was limited by the number of available licenses at any given time, until...

Until we discovered the IDL Virtual Machine which lets you run an IDL "executable" file without the need for licenses (see here for an example of how to create such a file).

The problem was that the IDL Virtual Machine is meant to be run interactively in a server with X running and Condor is not particularly well suited for this. But with a little ingenuity, we wrote a script (still in beta :-)) that uses Xvfb and Xautomation to submit condor jobs that will create a virtual X server, then automatically click the "Click to continue" button of the IDL virtual machine, and then do whatever the code is supposed to do. We have tested this, and so far it works quite well. There are some glitches with multicore machines and slow machines, but overall it works without any problems, and now we can submit hundreds of IDL jobs simultaneously to our Condor pool!

More info at SIEpedia

Real World Haskell, what a joy!

I just started reading "Real World Haskell" (http://book.realworldhaskell.org/). I'm quite new to Haskell (though not to functional programming), and I must say that it is a joy to read... I hope that in a few days I can start writing "real" programs with it (Project Euler is probably going to provide the content for my programs...)

Static IPs in Ubuntu 8.10....

Just configure a new machine with Ubuntu 8.10 (intrepid ibex). Everything went fine, except that one cannot configure static IPs properly. When the machine is booted, then something gets overwritten and it goes into DHCP mode again. Since we leave the machines on all day, this is not a problem (I just created a new network connection with the static IP address, and when the PC boots I just change manually to that configuration), but this would be annoying if we switched off the computers every day... Let's hope that 9.04 has solved this.

Accessing remote files with Tramp and Emacs

In recent versions of Emacs, tramp is already installed by default, and it is a very easy and convenient way of accessing files in a remote machine. All the documentation is at http://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/

Progress on this has been definitely slow, but I'm now in position 6 in Spain and in Fortran, nice coincidence...

One month in Project Euler

Yesterday it was one month since I found about Project Euler
(http://projecteuler.net/). During this month I've managed to do 69 of the
(as of today) 220 total problems, which has put me in position 18th in
Spain and position 6th for Fortran coders. Not bad... I've basically dealt
with the easier problems, although I've also tackled some of the more
recent ones. In total, it comes at about just a little bit more than 2
problems per day. With the remaining problems one can start to feel the
heat, so I guess the rhythm will go down a bit. My goal is to end the year
2008 going to level 3 (which you get when you solve 100 problems).