Science on a G5/PS3/MacPro – Benchmarks Security
As promised last week, I have here some benchmarks that compare the performance of double-precision floating point operations between a PowerMac (2.5 GHz G5), a PlayStation 3 (3.2 GHz Cell) and a Mac Pro (2.66 GHz Xeon). The PowerMac and Mac Pro are running Mac OS X Tiger. The PS3 is running…
Clusters and Supercomputers in Your Safe Finder? Meet MacFUSE.
I don’t know about you, but I often have to go through rings to retrieve output data from calculations run on clusters or supercomputers, in order to analyze it on my Mac. Most of these systems are well protected, with access only via SSH. That means either trusty command-line tools…
Security TCBuild: A New Build Tool for Fortran
Fortran 90 can include reasonably complex dependencies, which must be taken into account when building a multiple-file program. Unfortunately, most build tools either don’t support Fortran, or don’t help the developer much. A standard make file, for example, requires you to enter dependencies manually, or develop a script to do it for…
MacResearch: Science Related Requests for Apple
Update: The Tri-Cameral meeting starts this Wednesday and to date we’ve only received ~30 responses. This is a perfect opportunity for scientists to get their requests heard by Apple. Apple takes these meetings very seriously. How seriously? Enough that they will send Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering,…
Interview with Aaron Hillegass of Big Nerd Ranch
Aaron Hillegass has been teaching software developers about Mac OS X, and its forerunner at NeXT, for as long as anyone can remember. Recognizable by his enormous cowboy hat, Aaron has written several books, including one on Cocoa development that has become legendary, and runs the Big Nerd Ranch, an…
‘Molecules’ iPhone App Source Code Available
With the lifting of the iPhone NDA, Brad Larson — developer of the iPhone app ‘Molecules’, a 3D molecular viewer — has been able to release the application source code. He also has a detailed description of how it works on his blog. Brad previously blogged about his use of OpenGL ES, which was…
Write a Script to Send Database Query Results to Excel
Viewing database query results in the terminal is fine, but sometimes I need to get the results into Excel quickly so I can prod and analyze the data to see if I need to modify the query. Ideally I’d just query directly from Excel using and ODBC driver but our…
Automating Remote Data Fetching With Terminal.app: A Practical Example
I always tell people that my favorite aspect of UNIX is the fact that you can quickly and easily string together a few command-line utilities and do things that would require days worth of custom programming to pull off on Windows. There are plenty of UNIX geeks using OS X these days,…
LAPACK/BLAS from FORTRAN on 10.6
Dear all, since updating to 10.6, I’ve been struggling with strange crashes in connection with LAPACK/BLAS routines used in my C++ code, when using the Apple LAPACK and BLAS. They are strange in this sense, that I get a “Bus error” in a reproducible fashion, however depending on whether optimization…
Lab Journal: Installing Sun Grid Engine on Xserve Cluster
I recently started a postdoctoral position and one of my first tasks was to get Sun Grid Engine up and running on our new Xserve cluster. I downloaded the sge-6.1u2 darwin binaries from http://gridengine.sunsource.net/ and then began the installation. The installation scripts are very picky about DNS and hostnames. In…
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