Use Your Unused PC Power to save Life

Many PCs around the world, especially in office buildings, are left idle when their users or employees are not using them. Many of them quite powerful PCs (such as Pentium 4, AMD or even the 64-bit version and/or with dual core or multiprocessors). Why don't we use them for something useful?

There is a project at Stanford University under project Folding@Home that's trying to simulate proteins (interactions, quantum physics computing etc.). All of this computation requires very huge computation power. The group of Biochemistry, biophysics, chemistry, biology, physics and computer science experts led by Prof. Pande (called 'Pande Group') at Stanford has come up with a novel technology and idea: distributed computing (computational grid using clusters).

Instead of using single supercomputer to compute, the software distributes chunks of work to many computers connected to the server over the Internet. This chunk of work is called Work Unit. Every user who wants to contribute his/her computation power can subscribe and download the software (people can also affiliate to any groups or even make their own group). The software that's running on every user will then download workunits from Stanford University's server and does the computation. After the workunit has been done, the computer then send the result back to the server.

The software can use up to 100% utilization of the PC, but we can adjust how much it is allowed to consume (or even when the computer is idle only). There are different versions of software: console-only and screen-saver; available on Windows, Linux and PowerPC (MacOS). Unfortunately, Solaris has not been supported.

Actually, there is another project that came before Folding@Home (not sure which one came first). I used to run this program under project SETI@Home from UC Berkeley (?). But after sometime, I was thinking, why should I run such a useless program to find extra terrestrial (ET)? (Off the record, I don't believe there is another creatures in outerspace. Even if they exist, not with intelligence as human being have).

So, instead of leaving your PCs idle for many hours (do the math: you leave at 6:00 PM from work and come back next day at 8:00 AM. The PC is idle for 14 hours!), you participate to a project that can find cures for some diseases.

Please check it out at: http://folding.stanford.edu

AMD Clock and Voltage (part 2)

It's been awhile after I posted the first blog on the subject (AMD-64 on Compact Presario R3000). I just want to update the status on this issue: I one day checked AMD website and found out an information about "Windows XP incorrectly reports CPU clock". Overthere, they suggest users to upgrade the laptop BIOS. I followed their instructions and reboot my laptop.

Do you know what happened after my Windows XP rebooted? the CPU went to full clock speed and never scale back. The fan started to spin after a few seconds later and kept running. I checked CPU temperature (via 3rd party software I downloaded for free from the Net), it showed temp. close to 90 degrees Celsius! After a few minutes the computer turned off by itself (not a gracefuly shutdown!). I was like that no matter what I changed on the powersaving settings on Windows. Damn! (well, there was workaround. I used another software to manually control the CPU frequency back to 800 MHz to prevent it to overheat and shutdown). I checked on Microsoft site, the rebooting problem was caused by overheating.

I almost gave up (and did not use Windows during the time, but reboot to Linux partition. Linux successfuly control the acpi with no problem, besides it never reboots my computer). Finally, I give a try to download the latest AMD driver and reinstalled on my Windows. Somehow it now worked! (I am pretty sure I did exactly the same a few time before with no luck. So I believe there must be a fix in the newer driver).

Now PC is working OK. The frequency could scale up to its maximum (2.2 GHz). There is only 3 stages of frequencies: 800 MHz (base clock), 1.8 GHz and 2.2 GHz. The fan would turn on after a few seconds of CPU running at maximum clock and the temperature stabilizes around 80 degress Celsius, hence the Windows never reboots.

Phew!

Tweaking Linksys Router (Part 2)

OK, now I have upgraded my router's firmware to this fancy firmware: v4.70.6_Hyperwrt-2.1b1-(Thibor). Unfortunately, after looking around on the menus, I still could not found the wireless bridge feature. But, there is a cool feature there: telnet!

I then enabled telnet daemon and telnet into it. Do you know what's inside? Linux!! Wow, Linksys uses Linux for its router products!!. I then checked some stuff there. Pretty cool! Allright, maybe my next hacking project is how to hack the source code (it's available on linksys.com page, under GPL download). The source code is really huge, it is more than 100 MB even after zipped! Perhaps there are some binary firmwares inside it. I'll check it out later and report it on this blog once I am done checking out this amazing product.

(PS: I now highly recommend people to buy Linksys routers. I used to suggest people not to buy Linksys routers as their products relatively more expensive. But now, it is really worth it to invest a little bit for the really big thing you will get!)

Tweaking Linksys Router's Firmware

I just bought a Linksys wireless router WRT45GS. It is a wireless broadband router with speedbooster. According to the box, the speedbooster feature might boost speed up to 35%.
I buy this router because I want to make another 'wireless island' at home, and also because my phone cable that is going to the DSL modem has been severely degraded (when I check it, there is the insulator was torn, so the wires were almost broken). Why I use long phone cable to connect to my DSL modem? That's because there is no phone jack in the room where I put my desktop computers (which use CAT5 wires to connect to the router).

I bought the modem from Best Buy, which gave $20 rebate. Not bad for such a 54 Mbps wireless router, I said. But when I tried to configure it, I could not find anything on the web menu saying that the router is able to connect to another router via wireless connection. I was so dissapointed. I then went to the Internet and searched for information about this 'wireless bridging'. There are some hits, many links pointed me to the hardwares (such as Linksys Wireless Bridge). But this is not what I want!

After spent some more time to refine the search keyword, I eventually ended up to some discussion websites. Interestingly, these discussions mention about to upgrade the Linksys official firmware to the modified one! After going go Linksys website, I found out that for many of their products, they also provide the GPL source code for their products. Amazing! This modified firmware supports a feature called "WDS" (don't remember the abbrs., but is is something like wireless client).

The following links are few of them that have the information/and firmwares:

http://www.hyperwrt.org/

www.dd-wrt.com

http://sourceforge.net/projects/wifi-box

http://www.linksysinfo.org

http://wrt54g.thermoman.de/

Some of them require free subscription.

Next Generation Optical Transport?

Currently, optical transport (both SONET and SDH) technology used in service providers have reached its maturity and seems have stagnated. There is really no new features implemented on this technology. Most technology vendors have implemented features such as BLSR, UPSR, Bridge-and-roll, Ethernet over SONET (using GFP), even DWDM.

But, if we see the distribution of bandwidth used by customers, seems there is still a lot of 'dark' fiber, in other words, much of the bandwidths are left unused. Are these slots are really unused? If we see, in United States itself, High Definition TVs have not reached a point that many people expect. What about the Internet? well, eventhough most of the service providers (telephone, Internet or TV cable) give broadband accesses, the numbers are not satisfactory.

Now it is coming Packet-Over-ADM using optical connection. Many people are expecting this will be the next generation optical transport. Even some vendors have already had thse PADM-enabled equipments.

Technology-wise it is next generation optical transport, but what about business-wise? Well, let see what is going to happen in near future.

My Book Collections on Linux

A few months ago I bought another Linux-related book titled Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love. Very good book indeed! I have read the first few chapters of the book and couldn't stop to finish it (well, it is hard for me as I need to spare my time to read a lot other books and documents too).
This book add collection to my Linux bookshelf, besides Linux Device Driver, Linux Kernel, and Linux Wireless.