News for Monday, 6 December 2004

Las-Vegas has taken photos from Colette's shop in Paris.

It is simply 2 walls of 20 iMacG5 20" each which are presented behind the shop windows.
More photos are available here:
http://www.las-vegas.fr/rubrique11.html
http://www.colette.fr

One of our readers explains us how he finally had to set up an Xserve G5 cluster for his lab.

I am working on structural biochemistry in a research lab in California (University of California - Davis), and our needs for computing power are pretty important. Sooner or later we would need a cluster in order to relieve our SGI and Linux stations. Most of our applications being open-source, making them run on any kind of UNIX environment is no big deal. Consequently, I use my PowerBook G4 on a daily basis, instead of other workstations, because its power and the flexibility of OS X make everything faster.
It's benchmarks obtained from my laptop that brought the lab to consider more seriously the option of selecting a Xserve G5 cluster.
For this project, Apple's support was amazing, and illustrates how the company is interested in this field.
Therefore, I could test the Xserve G5 2x2Ghz and PowerMac 2x2Ghz for three weeks. An Apple engineer followed the whole project, and I was invited, among other University researchers, for one day at Cupertino's Infinite Loop for a seminar regarding "High Performance Computing". A whole bunch of engineers in charge of Tiger, Xserve or PowerMac detailed us how to optimize code for G5, and presented the Xserve clustering solutions. The demos made by those guys were absolutely amazing! We could chat with them, especially with engineers working on the G5 water-cooling (lots of troubles) and also about the famous Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT. Though we had no access to restricted information, discussing with those people was really a great time.
I'd like to stress the fact that those guys are really willing to know our wishes and needs, and are concerned by the problems we meet with hard- and software.
With the following outcome: we ordered a cluster of 6 Xserve Dual G5, that we hope to bring up to 16 nodes. Delivery was ultrafast: 3 days. We have 1 Xserve server, and 5 cluster nodes, linked altogether by Gigabit. One Apple engineer helps me when I need it, for setting up the cluster.
A long talk to testify that, at contrary to what can be heard from time to time in the scientific community, Apple is extremely involved in customer relationships.
I'm 100% satisfied.

Of course, the geographic proximity of the lab and Apple's one had probably a major role to play in the strong and direct involvement of Apple's engineers. We'd like to talk with them too :)

The main criticism regarding online music is the lack of booklets, usually found in the standard album CD case. It seems that once again iTMS may have innovated by proposing the new U2 album, including the complete Booklet:

It is a 12 pages PDF file, the booklet is identical to the one found in the normal Album CD case, including photos and texts.
An excellent idea that we expect will be applied to the entire online music offer...

From CompUSA website, one can see the following product:

We could have dreamed about, except that the ordering number M9628LL/A is corresponding to the current G4 1.33 GHz.

Since IBM has opened the PowerPC architecture to others, TechNotes related to PowerPC are getting available.
Today, it is an interesting article dealing with "IBM PowerPC 970FX power-on reset mechanism".
http://www-03.ibm.com...article4.html

Thank you L.C. to have tipped us about the front page of the "New York Times" supplement in the French paper "Le Monde".