There hasn't been much in the way of posts here lately as I've been really busy at work getting some new components built into the systems I work on. Not really hard but it's frustrating things like trying to get various components and libraries written in different languages to work together. So lately I've not had the energy to do much work on the computer once I get home...
There has been a bit of interest in my 3D Gaussian convolution kernels. Although I explained the technique mathematically in an earlier post I never actually posted the code. As it is rather quick and quite a novel way of calculating the convolution for a xy plane I decided to post it so everyone can benefit from / improve upon the technique. As always comments / bug reports etc are always welcome :)
Thursday, 30 July 2009
Thursday, 23 July 2009
Happy blog day!
My little blog is officially one year old today! :)
Over the last year I've made many more posts than I was originally planning to make and judging by the number of subscribers and variety of institutions and people who visit it's not entirely all rubbish, or so I like to tell myself.
Ongoing projects that will hopefully get completely or improved in the coming year are:
Thermal monitor - networking coming soon
More raytracing (of course) - linking PhysX to it (thanks to Timothy's post here for inspiration) to improve on my rather primitive bouncing balls.
SPH and Lattice methods for fluid simulation
Sorting algorithms - I haven't posted much on this lately but some decent results so far
Massive Data set processing.
Anything else that grabs my interest
Over the last year I've made many more posts than I was originally planning to make and judging by the number of subscribers and variety of institutions and people who visit it's not entirely all rubbish, or so I like to tell myself.
Ongoing projects that will hopefully get completely or improved in the coming year are:
Thermal monitor - networking coming soon
More raytracing (of course) - linking PhysX to it (thanks to Timothy's post here for inspiration) to improve on my rather primitive bouncing balls.
SPH and Lattice methods for fluid simulation
Sorting algorithms - I haven't posted much on this lately but some decent results so far
Massive Data set processing.
Anything else that grabs my interest
Tuesday, 21 July 2009
Throughput Computing
Two weeks ago I attended a seminar at the Daresbury laboratory near Warrington. Unfortunately I only had the day off so couldn't attend the workshops on offer and buttercup, my trusty landy, had to drive there and back on the same day. Sorry to everyone on the m4, m5 and m6 that day :p
Jack Dongarra presented a rather nice summary of supercomputing / parallel computing or as he called it "Throughput Computing". I had never heard this term before and now really like it. It implies that you should make the best of available resources in order to maximize throughput. It's very easy to get into a mindset where everything has to be in parallel but it's possible by doing so you neglect to notice that some parts work very well in serial.
Jack Dongarra presented a rather nice summary of supercomputing / parallel computing or as he called it "Throughput Computing". I had never heard this term before and now really like it. It implies that you should make the best of available resources in order to maximize throughput. It's very easy to get into a mindset where everything has to be in parallel but it's possible by doing so you neglect to notice that some parts work very well in serial.
Friday, 3 July 2009
Numerical Precision
Numerical precision is an ongoing concern of mine especially in big / long running simulations and solvers.
I came across an article by Rob Farber on the scientificcomputing.com site this morning that asks the question "How much is Enough?". Although no definitive answers are presented the author summarizes the current and future concerns over accuracy.
Personally I don't believe floating point is the way forward. Floating point is fast to calculate in hardware but is not always an ideal way of representing numbers. Although the various branches of mathematics are largely base independent humans are most comfortable with base 10 while computers are of course most comfortable with base 2. This does result in some situations when a calculation in base 10 with only a few decimals of precision gives precise results whereas a calculation in base 2 is incapable of giving a precise result even given N bits of precision although the result is probably acceptable after n bits.
I'm not presenting any solution to the precision problem, but merely pointing out that sometimes the issue is caused by: using base 2 for calculations and/or the floating point representation of these numbers.
I came across an article by Rob Farber on the scientificcomputing.com site this morning that asks the question "How much is Enough?". Although no definitive answers are presented the author summarizes the current and future concerns over accuracy.
Personally I don't believe floating point is the way forward. Floating point is fast to calculate in hardware but is not always an ideal way of representing numbers. Although the various branches of mathematics are largely base independent humans are most comfortable with base 10 while computers are of course most comfortable with base 2. This does result in some situations when a calculation in base 10 with only a few decimals of precision gives precise results whereas a calculation in base 2 is incapable of giving a precise result even given N bits of precision although the result is probably acceptable after n bits.
I'm not presenting any solution to the precision problem, but merely pointing out that sometimes the issue is caused by: using base 2 for calculations and/or the floating point representation of these numbers.
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
BV2 Thermal monitor v0.11
Here is a small update to the Thermal Monitor which implements the "always on top" feature. This can be enabled and disabled by right clicking on its little system try icon.
This is not the point release as planned as some of the additional features were appearing a bit unstable on my Win XP pro 64 machine. Until I find time to sort them out I thought I would release the most requested feature.
The source code is included. It is still in masm and does include routines for non-standard window shapes and transparent blts etc - could be worth a look if you are interested in masm32.
It is now available in the downloads section or here:
[download id="4"] - Please see Licenses Section for license details. By downloading you agree to be bound by the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.
This is not the point release as planned as some of the additional features were appearing a bit unstable on my Win XP pro 64 machine. Until I find time to sort them out I thought I would release the most requested feature.
The source code is included. It is still in masm and does include routines for non-standard window shapes and transparent blts etc - could be worth a look if you are interested in masm32.
It is now available in the downloads section or here:
[download id="4"] - Please see Licenses Section for license details. By downloading you agree to be bound by the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.
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