High Performance Clusters

provided by a single computer, while typically being much more cost-effective than single computers of comparable speed or availability. The clustering of processors is done to improve the capabilities of the processing system as a whole.

Cluster Envoirnment

Cluster made with Home PCs

The central concept of a Cluster computing is the use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) computers to produce a cost-effective alternative to a traditional supercomputer. This means that the nodes in the cluster could be any commercialy availabe computer.

Two main advantages with Clustering is the  adoption of open source software concepts and scalability. Open source softwares such as Linux is the primary operating system used in clustering these days.

What if I came up to you and told you that the thin divide between the email and the IM could be removed without a trace?

What if I tell you that a new communication model can transcend or possibly accommodate all existing ones on the web, right from the conventional mail to the latest sensation, Twitter.

What if digital communication among the masses, finally, becomes ‘real-time’?

Probably, you’ll ignore me, go back and then tweet on what a hopeless dreamer you think I am. But then again, I am sure one of your ‘followers’ will reply to correct you for I had just described the Google Wave.

"We haven't been invited to try out Google Wave (yet? pretty please Mister Google?), but based on the 80-minute demonstration video, we're jazzed about it. Don't have 80 minutes? These eight 30-60 second clips highlight the best parts of Google Wave..." (click here to view more)

Google vs Bing

Can Bing possibly achieve the impossible? Can it dethrone the Google? Read on as Lance Loveday from search engine land.com reviews Microsoft’s new search engine from an average user perspective.

"Yes, this is another article about Bing. But I’m going to take a different spin. Instead of doing another expert review of the quality of the results and the cool interface like all the other search geeks (I use the term with affection), I want to review Bing the way that normal people will. So I’m going to take off my search expert hat and approach Bing from the perspective of the average user, who has very different concerns and motivations than the average search expert—starting with the fact that they don’t give much conscious thought to them at all. Because let’s face it: while every search geek in the world has been checking Bing out this week, our moms don’t even know it exists yet."(click here to view more)

The 'HOW TO' section is an all new feature of the IT Bytes, created with the intention of providing answers to those little yet nagging questions about technology that a common man might have. Here are a set of questions whose answers you might find useful.

How to get a hit counter for your website?

It is quite simple. You will be able to easily find a lot of websites that provide a free hit counters. http://www.freehitscounters.org/ is one of them.

1. Choose the design for your counter. (This cannot be tweaked unless you write your own code)

2. Enter your site address and the starting count for your counter (useful when you are embedding your counter after knowing that you have reasonable site traffic).

3. Get the code and embed it. Embedding is just copy-pasting (Ctrl C + Ctrl V) the code onto a particular section of your website.

Eg.

Secret - The t = 2 in the above code correspongs to the design you had chosen. So, you can change this after you embed the code as well. ;-)

How to change screen resolution in Windows?

1. In Windows Vista, right-click on the desktop, go to Personalize > Display Settings

2. Choose the desired resolution from a set of available resolutions and choose OK to confirm your decision.

How to add a Google Map to my website?

You can embed a simple map, a set of driving directions, a local search, or maps created by other users by following these steps:

1. Go to maps.google.com and search for the desired location(s).
2. Ensure that the map you'd like to embed appears in the current map display.
3. Click Link in the top-right corner of the map.
4. In the box that pops up, copy the HTML under 'Paste HTML to embed in website,' and paste it into the source code of your website or blog.

If you'd like to adjust the size of the map before you embed it, just click Customize and preview embedded map, select your preferred size, and take a look at the preview map. Remember that some of the map is static and some of its features are disabled until you get the API key.

Click Here to send us your questions and replies to questions or simply e-mail to newsletter@nusacm.org

A magnetic drum storage unit

"A recent article devoted to the *macho* side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement:

Real Programmers write in Fortran.

Maybe they do now in this decadent era of lite beer, hand calculators, and user friendly software but back in the Good Old Days when the term 'software' sounded funny and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes Real Programmers wrote in machine code. Not Fortran. Not RATFOR. Not even assembly language. Machine Code. Raw unadorned inscrutable hexadecimal numbers. Directly.

Lest a whole new generation of programmers grow up in ignorance of this glorious past I feel duty bound to describe as best I can through the generation gap how a Real Programmer wrote code. I'll call him 'Mel' because that was his name.

I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp, a now defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company. The firm manufactured the LGP-30, a small cheap (by the standards of the day) drum memory computer and had just started to manufacture the RPC-4000, a much improved bigger better faster drum memory computer. Cores cost too much and weren't here to stay anyway...."(click here to view more)