Free Full version of ILOG Optimization products via IBM's Academic Initiative Program

Since 15th February 2010, , IBM is offering no-charge full-version ILOG Optimization products via IBM's Academic Initiative Program. The ILOG Optimization provides registered members with renewable one-year access to IBM ILOG OPL-CPLEX, CPLEX, CP Optimizer and CP for both teaching and research use.

Registered members can access and obtain ILOG Optimization software at: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/university/software/get_software.html, where they can search for ILOG Optimization or individual solvers

To run the software, members will also need to download a key from: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/university/support/ilog.html, but are no longer required to install ILM. Note that as part of Academic Initiative, IBM also makes its professionally-developed training materials available for use in classrooms and labs at: https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/devtool/scholar/web/coursewarePickPage.do?source=ai-course-websphere.

For ILOG support, you can go to IBM Academic Initiative Support for more information

Automatically load sessions with SSH

To run a program after the ssh, simply pass the program at the end of the ssh command

# ssh root@remote.server.com nano

To connect into a remote screen session, it is necessary to add the "-t" flag

# ssh -t root@remote.server.com screen -dr

According to the ssh man page, the "-t" flag force pseudo-tty allocation. This can be used to execute arbi-
trary screen-based programs on a remote machine.

For the screen command "screen -dr", it refers to reattaching a session and if necessary detach it first.

Very useful indeed

Configuration of EtherChannel / Link aggregation with ESX

Taken and summarised from Vmware KB Article "Sample configuration of EtherChannel / Link aggregation with ESX and Cisco/HP switches". This KB article applies to Vmware products version 3.0.x to version 4.1.x


This article describes the sample configurations of configurations of link aggregation / NIC Teaming / LACP / Ether-Channel connectivity between ESX and Physical Network Switches.....

For more information, see Sample configuration of EtherChannel / Link aggregation with ESX

Wiping Data Permanently from the command line

Learned this from the Tip and Tricks from Linux For You Magazine August 2010 Edition

Do be careful when you fire this command as this will destroy all your data. You should use the utilities shred

# shred -v -n 2 -z /dev/sdc

where

-v: verbose
-n: number of passes of random data
-z: finishes cleaning with one pass of zero

Sage - an Open Source Mathematics Software System

Sage is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It combines the power of many existing open-source packages into a common Python-based interface.

Additional Documentation:

1. Sage Tutorial
2. Sage Installation Guide
3. Sage FAQ
4. Download for Linux

Smokescreen - Flash.... without plugin

What on earth is Smokescreen?
Smokescreen is a new open-source project aimed at converting Flash to JavaScript/HTML5 to run on devices that does not support adobe flash....

Smokescreen will soon be released for free under an open source license. So look out for more information.
Yes, do look at the Smokescreen Demo

Deploying Big-IP LTM with Microsoft Remote Desktop Services

If you are deploying vwith Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services, you will find these articles useful for the deployment......


For more information, read my blog Deploying Big-IP LTM with Microsoft Remote Desktop Services

Connection activation failed Device not managed by NetworkManager

After a fresh installation of Fedora 13, I encountered "Connection activation failed Device not managed by Network Manager". I have no ethernet connection.

Just like all RH users, I did a

# service network restart

And I go this error

Shutting down interface eth0:  Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown:
The name com.redhat.ifcfgrh1 was not provided by any .service files
Error: Device 'eth0' (/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/0) disconnecting
failed: Cannot disconnect an inactive device.
                                                           [FAILED]
Shutting down interface eth1:  Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown:
The name com.redhat.ifcfgrh1 was not provided by any .service files
Error: Device 'eth0' (/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/0) disconnecting
failed: Cannot disconnect an inactive device.
                                                           [FAILED]
Shutting down loopback interface:  Error
org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name com.redhat.ifcfgrh1 was not
provided by any .service files
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name com.redhat.ifcfgrh1
was not provided by any .service files
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name com.redhat.ifcfgrh1
was not provided by any .service files
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name com.redhat.ifcfgrh1
was not provided by any .service files
                                                           [  OK  ]
Bringing up loopback interface:  Error

It is only starting the Network Manager Manually, I got my ethernet connection

# /etc/init.d/NetworkManager start

For more information on this phenomenon, you can take a look at Bug 583113 - Error while starting network service soon after fresh installation  

Detecting Intel VT and AMD-V

Here is a simple and useful short writeup on how to Detect Intel VT and AMD-V and enabling it to ensure you can have the virtualisation extension for your Hyper-V, KVM or other Hyper-Visor that make use of hardware virtualisation

Detecting Intel VT and AMD-V from vmjournal.wordpress.com

Determining if Intel Virtualization Technology or AMD Virtualization is enabled in the BIOS without rebooting

If you are using Vmware Technology for your Virtualisation, you may find this information useful.

Taken from Vmware KB Determining if Intel Virtualization Technology or AMD Virtualization is enabled in the BIOS without rebooting (Jul 29 2010). Simplified at my blog Determining if Intel Virtualization Technology or AMD Virtualization is enabled in the BIOS without rebooting (Virtual Machine Journal)

Product Versions affected:

VMware ESX 3.0.x
VMware ESX 3.5.x
VMware ESX 4.0.x
VMware ESXi 3.5.x Embedded
VMware ESXi 3.5.x Installable
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Embedded
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Installable

Advanced Management Module firmware v3.54L (BPET54L) - IBM BladeCenter dated 7th Jul 2010

There is a new update for Advanced Management Module Firmware v3.54L (BPET54L) for IBM Blade Centre dated 23rd July 2010.  With the apply of this updates, one of my blade server was finally rediscovered....

As for the instruction how to update, here the setup instruction
ftp://download2.boulder.ibm.com/ecc/sar/CMA/XSA/ibm_fw_amm_bpet54l_anyos_noarch.txt


IBM BladeCenter E Chassis (7967, 1881, 8677)
IBM BladeCenter H Chassis (7989, 8852)
IBM BladeCenter HT Chassis (8740, 8750)
IBM BladeCenter S Chassis (1948, 7779)
IBM BladeCenter S Express
IBM BladeCenter HC10 (7996)
IBM BladeCenter HS12 (8028, 1916, 8014)
IBM BladeCenter HS20 (8832, 1884, 8678, 8843, 7981, 1883)
IBM BladeCenter HS21 (1885, 8853, 7995)
IBM BladeCenter HS21 XM (1915, 7995)
IBM BladeCenter HS22 (7870, 1936, 7809)
IBM BladeCenter HS22V (7871, 1949)
IBM BladeCenter HS40 (8839)
IBM BladeCenter HX5 (7872, 1909)
IBM BladeCenter JS20 (8842)
IBM BladeCenter JS21 (7988, 8844)
IBM BladeCenter JS23 (7778)
IBM BladeCenter JS43 (7778)
IBM BladeCenter LS20 (8850)
IBM BladeCenter LS21 (7971)
IBM BladeCenter LS22 (7901)
IBM BladeCenter LS41 (7972)
IBM BladeCenter LS42 (7902)
IBM BladeCenter PS700 (8406)
IBM BladeCenter PS701 (8406)
IBM BladeCenter PS702 (8406)
IBM BladeCenter JS22
IBM BladeCenter QS21
IBM BladeCenter QS22

Intel Unveils New Product Plans for High-Performance Computing - Knight Corners

A possible non-GP-GPU route with many CPU on a chip? As intel put it Single Chip Cloud Computer

During the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), Intel Corporation announced plans to deliver new products based on the Intel® Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture that will create platforms running at trillions of calculations per second, while also retaining the benefits of standard Intel processors...... [Read On "Intel Unveils New Product Plans for High-Performance Computing"]

Do Read

1. Futuristic Intel Chip Could Reshape How Computers are Built, Consumers Interact with Their PCs and Personal Devices
2. A webcast of Kirk Skaugen's International Supercomputing 2010 keynote presentation will be available here: lecture2go.uni-hamburg.de/live.
3. Keynote Presentation: Petascale to Exascale - Extending Intel’s HPC Commitment (PDF 7.6MB)

MPI_ERRORS_ARE_FATAL for ARPACK running OpenMPI on CentOS 4

One of our researcher was using ARPACK and OpenMPI and was facing an issue. He faced this problem.

mpirun -np 1 pssdrv1_intel_em64t [xxx.edu.sg:19479] *** An error occurred in MPI_Allreduce [xxx.edu.sg:19479] *** on communicator MPI_COMM_WORLD [xxx.edu.sg:19479] *** MPI_ERR_OP: invalid reduce operation [xxx.edu.sg:19479] *** MPI_ERRORS_ARE_FATAL (your MPI job will now abort)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
mpirun has exited due to process rank 0 with PID 19479 on node xxx.edu.sg exiting without calling "finalize". This may have caused other processes in the application to be terminated by signals sent by mpirun (as reported here).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

He managed to solve the problem by removing mpif.h from the source code and assuming ifort is already compiled with OpenMPI, the package should work. This is because PARPACK is relative established package for parallel iterative matrix diagonlization and was developed based on early MPI standard

I have not verified the solution but we have a happy scientist......

ARPACK SOFTWARE

ARPACK is a collection of Fortran77 subroutines designed to solve large scale eigenvalue problems.

The package is designed to compute a few eigenvalues and corresponding eigenvectors of a general n by n matrix A. It is most appropriate for large sparse or structured matrices A where structured means that a matrix-vector product w <- Av requires order n rather than the usual order n2 floating point operations......