Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)
FLOSS Weekly recently ran an interview with the creator of the Xen project, Ian Pratt from the University of Cambridge (and now working for Citrix since they bought Xensource). Since I happen to like virtual things, even the so-much-talked-about-it-hurts IT/server/desktop virtualization world this was a must-listen. It was a good show, but lacking some in the humble background department.
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly on Xen: Some Background Missing”
In FLOSS Weekly issue 57, about 20 minutes into the show, Randall Schwartz and Leo Laporte express genuine surprise that the XMBC media player application is all in C++. That is pretty telling, some parts of the computing world are indeed moving on to more modern pastures like Python, Perl, Ruby, and even Objective C (for the Mac people). And quite a contrast to the EDA world where C++ is still considered the new shiny thing, as I have lamented before… thanks for that small but golden genuine surprise, Randall and Leo!
FLOSS Weekly recently podcast an interview with Jeff Squyres of OpenMPI. OpenMPI is an open-source implementation of the MPI programming standard. Jeff makes some interesting points on how this has worked out and why it makes, and what MPI is all about. ´
I just listened to another Floss Weekly show, Number 36 where they interviewed Jan Lehnard of the CouchDB project. CouchDB is very interesting, in that it is a database designed for replication, redundancy, and thus massive parallelism. It was initially written by Damien Katz on his own, but now it is an Apache Foundation project sponsored by IBM. The most interesting thing is that Damien decided in 2006 to rewrite the C++ prototype he had in Erlang, and did so in just a few months if I understood my Erlang friends right. So here we have a really good parallel program written in a true parallel language.
Continue reading “CouchDB: A Parallel Program in a Parallel Language”