Tech

GridGain is an open source product written in Java providing a grid computing platform. It is known to be one of the more widely used grid product, certainly, as far as I see, one of the easiest to "gridify" or grid-enable an existing product.

One of the applications of the product is to couple with Amazon EC2 to make a "cloud" computing platform. See Gridgain + Amazon EC2

The widespread use of "multi-core" PCs also means that the product can be used to "parallelise" to take advantage of this increased power.

Prof. Eric Brewer of Inktomi talked about the re-emergence of the time-sharing idea in the form of web service in his recent interview with FT. Tell me if I am being dumb, but is he saying what I am hearing or is the journalist confused with what he was actually saying?

WARNING! The following article is very old, in fact more than 2 years old!

It's a kind of pain to make work together Linux, AvantGo, Evolution and Sony Clie or any Palm devices. Sony Clie is well recognised by kernels >= 2.4 through the USB Serial converter, and simply linking /dev/pilot to /dev/ttyUSB0 enabled to sync it with most sync tools available in Linux, including JPilot. However, Evolution, which I think is by far the best PIM available in Linux, causes a problem syncing, probably due to its use of gnome pilot. Gnome-pilot seems to have stopped being developed and it hardly has any documentation, as far as I know. But I still wanted to make Evolution and my Clie sync! In addition, I like AvantGo (http://www.avantgo.com), which provides a free service to download news from various sources on the Internet and, again, want to sync through Linux.

WARNING! The article below is based on my experience with VMWare Workstation 3. It may well be old so the users of the article are at their own risk!

Note VMware uses usbdevfs to access Linux host's USB system.

1. Make sure that usbdevfs is enabled in your kernel. (If not, you should recompile your kernel with that enabled)
2. Reboot the system with the new kernel (if you recompiled it). You should be able to see /proc/bus/usb (under RedHat, at least)
3. Edit /etc/fstab and add the following code:

none /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs noauto 0 0

4. Mount /proc/bus/usb and you should be able to use USB under your guest OS.

For more information, please visit vmware.com

The combination of GridGain with Amazon EC2 is a poor man's super computer.

Max Gorbunov tells his experience in his blog of running Monte Carlo simulations on 512 nodes

My Comprehensive Model Backtester also relies on GridGain, but on a local quad-core machine. It is an efficient and easy (so far I find) way of taking advantages of multi-core machine power.