ALIVE @ Samford University

After a late start, we made it into Gatlinburg, TN just after 1AM. We got to drive through light snow falling, and see all the beautiful Christmas lights with hardly any traffic on the roads at all. Now it is on to the very serious business of wrapping up my presentation that I am due to be giving in exactly 12 hours. I am close, but not quite finished with my primary experiment. I should have it wrapped up soon and will update this post with a copy of the powerpoint once its ready.

Update - the presentation went well! Here are the powerpoint slides:

Investigating the impact of Ajax on server load in a web 2.0 application powerpoint (3.1MB)

November 21st, 2008 | Tags: conference, powerpoint, presentation, travel | Category: research | Leave a comment

I have been a long time user of bibliography search engines such as citeseer, the ACM portal, IEEExplore, etc… but I have always turned to standalone software applications such as Endnote and JabRef to manage the articles I find. This summer I created my own web-based annotated bibliography tool and just barely got it off the ground before the need for it subsided. Now, tonight as I am organizing my references for an upcoming conference presentation, I just discovered a tool that surpasses the tool that I created and adds a social networking element. The website is called CiteULike (screenshot below) -

As far as I can tell, the only way to group entries in your library is by creating a special “group” where any registered member can join and post entries or by tagging each entry that you want to belong in a category with a special keyword. I have opted for the latter approach as I only want articles that I post to be in my reference library. The screenshot is showing a post that I just made. The site seems to be pretty response and there is an active bookmark link that you can add to your browser toolbar to quickly create a new bibliography entry from the page you are currently viewing.

November 20th, 2008 | Tags: tools, web 2.0 | Category: research | Leave a comment

I have always been conservative when it comes to the stability of my computer systems. My reasoning is that I have invested too much money in the equipment to ruin it by being performance greedy. Today, though, I read an interesting article on Tom’s Hardware that convinced me to give overclocking a try.

Motivation

I recently upgraded my primary development machine. This new Intel-based system will serve double duty as my production server in the near future. During the current development stage of my e-commerce site, I would like to overclock the server and see how stable it is at a relatively conservative overclock setup. The current limiting factor for my target application is a CPU-intensive program called Global Mapper that spends a majority of its time maxing out the CPU after an initial hit on the hard drive to load data into RAM. This is followed by an erie silence with zero hard drive activity and 100% CPU-load for minutes to hours (for really large maps) while the CPU is being used to perform calculations to determine how best to render the mapping data. Increasing the CPU clock rate directly affects the rate at which maps can be produced - thus overclocking my processor by 20% will net close to a 20% performance boost in this particular application.

The system specifications

• Intel Core 2 Quad 9550 processor, 2.83GHz, 12 MB cache
• ASUS P5Q SE/R Motherboard (Intel P45 chipset with ICH10R Southbridge providing RAID)
• 8GB G.SKill P8500 DDR2 RAM operating at 1066MHz
• (2) 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM, 32MB cache hard drives operating in RAID 0
• 500W Energy efficient Antec earthwatts power supply

The overclocking experience

I began with Internet research to see the experience of other people trying to overclock similar systems. I found this article on Tom’s Hardware particularly helpful: “How would I overclock q9550 to 3.4ghz“. I decided I would first try updating the FSB from its default of 333MHz to 400MHz and then leave all other settings at auto to let the motherboard adjust as needed. Well, I managed to boot up into Vista, but as soon as I loaded up Global Mapper and tried to import a large dataset, I had a complete system lock-up. I suspect that the core voltage for the CPU was not raised sufficiently by the motherboard to adjust for the faster clock rate.

After a reboot, and a BIOS update which was required to interact with the latest version of ASUS AI Suite for monitoring various CPU and motherboard sensors as well as dynamically changing BIOS settings without having to reboot the computer, I had the system up and running with the following manual settings entered into the BIOS:

• CPU vcore: 1.28125
• FSB: 400MHz
• Memory speed: 400MHz (800 effective b/c of dual-channel interface)
• Memory timings: 4-4-4-12
• Memory voltage: 1.8 (matches memory specs for the GSkill memory)

The results

The screenshots below tell the story: overclocked at 3.4 GHz, able to successfully complete the PC Mark Vantage x64 test suite, memory running in dual channel mode at an effective 800 MHz. So far the system has been up and running for a few hours with no more lock-ups. I plan to run prime95 tonight to see if it can make it all the way through. Since a number of people have reported overclocking this setup to 4 GHz and beyond, I am not too worried!

CPUZ screenshots - View the online validator results.

Modest improvement of 7.5% over the non overclocked setup (not shown, pc mark results = 6934)

The reason for the limited 7.5% improvement even though my clock speed has been upgraded by 20% is because PC Mark vantage stresses hard drive access times, for which I only have a mediocre setup — even though I have incredible transfer rates from the drive to memory. A more telling figure is the time required to generate the exact same map in the overclocked setup vs the original non-overclocked setup. Generating the color-coded shaded relief map for the entire state of Colorado took 15.9 minutes in the original setup. With the overclocked setup, the same exact map only took 13.5 minutes — almost 18% faster!

Don’t stop now! Continue reading here »

November 18th, 2008 | Category: hardware | Leave a comment

The last component of my computer upgrade arrived today in a surprisingly small box. I purchased an ATI HD 4670 graphics card based on the Tom’s hardware recommendation for entry level graphics cards. I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on this upgrade, but yet I wanted a card that would allow me to harness some of the parallel processing power via GPGPU programming. The HD 4670 has 320 streaming processors, which I am hoping to experiment with to increase the map rendering speed for topocreator.com.

After installing the card, I updated my Windows Vista Experience Index and it went from 3.3 up to a whopping 5.8 (5.9 is the maximum possible score). Note that my Primary hard disk - (2) 500 gb seagate drives in RAID 0 configuration - is rated at 5.9. This is significant for my PC Mark Vantage experiment further down in this post.

Windows Vista Experience Index - 5.9 is the highest score possible

Next, I re-ran PC Mark Vantage and was hoping for a figure somewhere in the 8000’s. Instead, I saw an increase from 6144 to 6655 - much lower than expected. Further investigation revealed that tests involving my HDD (hard disk drive) performance had very low scores. I discovered that Windows search was indexing my drive in the background, so I disabled Windows search and re-ran the benchmark. This saw a further increase to 6934 with slighly improved HDD performance. See screenshots below:

Don’t stop now! Continue reading here »

November 11th, 2008 | Tags: benchmark, gpgpu | Category: hardware | Comments (1)

The computer upgrade has gone really well, but it has been quite an adventure. The coffee cups on the table tell the story — lots of early mornings and late nights! The early results have been very promising on two fronts: 1) Individual maps can be produced two to three times faster than the original machine. 2) I was inspired during the upgrade to write a workshop paper for ICSE 2009 documenting my usage of Microsoft Office OneNote to bring topocreator.com from idea to live e-commerce website!

All that is left at this point is to replace the graphics card I am currently borrowing with ATI’s top “entry-level” card, the ATI HD 4670, which should be arriving on Tuesday. Since ATI is now owned by AMD, this is a great way of spreading the love around between processor manufacturers since everything else in the system is Intel-based.

November 9th, 2008 | Tags: photos, research | Category: hardware | Leave a comment

On Tuesday, the new 500GB seagate hard drives arrived at the house. This was to be my first experience setting up drives in a RAID configuration let alone installing a windows operating system onto it — definitely a learning experience!

Desired setup:

• RAID 0 (performance) using two 500GB hard drives for a total capacity of 1TB
• Windows Vista Business 64-bit edition with 8GB of RAM

The installation proceeded with me disconnecting all cables, opening the case, and loading the two hard drives into an internal bay in the case. This was the easy part - 30 minutes if you include all the unwrapping, unpacking, etc.

Next, it was time to use the BIOS utility to create the RAID volume. This was also a snap, once I figured out that you had to hit tab to see the POST messages before hitting the designated key combination of Ctrl+i to access the hidden RAID utility built into the BIOS. Again, no problem — 10 minutes with a couple reboots.

Finally, I was ready for the Windows Vista installation. This is where I ran into a number of problems with the installer. I had already determined from my initial research that there is no “winging it” with the windows installation. You MUST have the correct driver for your RAID controller - there is no generic controller included with the Windows installation media that works for a RAID drive — if the driver for your particular RAID controller is not included in the Windows installation package, then you must have your manufacturer’s driver to proceed with the installation. There is a special screen in the Windows Vista installation where you can load a driver for asking your hard drive. I was able to download the driver onto a USB flash drive and have the Windows installer pick up that driver, but I was still receiving a “Windows cannot find a volume that meets system requirements” error. I tried several different versions of the driver, but none of them worked. Finally, I tried updating the BIOS even though the factory-installed BIOS was only a few months old. Bingo! The install worked perfectly on the next attempt!

Once I had everything up and running, I was able to run PC Mark Vantage and this time, I did notice a marked improvement over my current development machine — almost twice as fast! Also my Windows Vista user experience score maxed out the Processor, Memory, and Primary hard disk categories with a 5.9 in each (the maximum rating). My graphics and gaming graphics are still weak, but my new entry level gaming graphics card ATI HD4670 is going to be here next week and that should take care of that. I am hoping to dive into the field of GPGPU (general-purpose computation using graphics processing units integrated into modern graphics cards) and take advantage of the extreme parallelism found in modern graphics cards to create maps even faster.

November 5th, 2008 | Tags: hardware | Category: Uncategorized, hardware | Leave a comment

It’s Saturday morning, and I am in the process of upgrading an old computer I have to help support the development of topocreator.com. This website has inspired me for a number of research projects along the way to becoming (hopefully) a successful e-commerce website. The backend program I am using to create maps is quite CPU intensive (0% hard drive activity after initial data load, 100% cpu usage for minutes to hours depending on the size of the map).

The computer I am upgrading is about 7 years old and is one that I built while a grad student at UC Davis. The specs for it are: Dual Pentium III 1 GHz processors with 512MB of RAM (the maximum allowed by the motherboard). The only components that will remain after the upgrade will be the case, an old graphics card, and a cd-writer. All other components will be replaced. The upgraded system will have the following components:

• Intel Core 2 Quad 9550 processor, 2.83GHz, 12 MB cache
• ASUS P5Q SE/R Motherboard (Intel P45 chipset with ICH10R Southbridge providing RAID)
• 8GB G.SKill P8500 DDR2 RAM operating at 1066MHz
• (2) 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM, 32MB cache hard drives operating in RAID 0
• 500W Energy efficient Antec earthwatts power supply
• A very old cd-writer that still works (hopefully)
• A new lightscribe DVD writer, CD writer combo drive

1 - Analise and Josiah help unpack the box from newegg.com

2 - All the new components are laid out on the table

3 - The current setup showing the computer to be replaced on the bottom

11:15AM So that brings us to where we are now. I am making a rough outline of the next steps to tackle as detailed below:

Don’t stop now! Continue reading here »

November 1st, 2008 | Tags: hardware, liveblog | Category: hardware | Comments (1)

Samford’s inaugural programming team - The Red C - 2008 Mobile, AL - The Samford University programming team placed first in the “1st timers” sub-competition at the 2008 Southeastern regional programming competition. They solved two problems quickly and had a number of solutions in the works when time was called. To put it in perspective, out of all seventy+ teams working on the 10 competition problems, the most problems solved by any team was 5.

October 27th, 2008 | Tags: acm, photos | Category: News | Comments (1)

Update! 6:30pm 1st place! We won the “1st timers” categories because Southern Miss went on to place in the top 3 overall, which made them ineligible for our category. Way to go team!

Update! 4:30pm The live scoreboard has been frozen to increase the drama surrounding the last hour of the competition. Can UAB stay on top (at our tournament)? Can anyone unseat the current overall leader UCF? Can Samford come from behind and win the “1st timers” competition. We will know the answer to all these questions in 1 hour!

Update! 3:59pm The Southern Miss “Golden Eagles” just pulled ahead in the “1st timers” category by solving a third problem. There’s still time left for us to come back.

Update! 3:25pm Our team has solved a second problem which puts them in the lead in the “1st timers” category. Come on “Red C”!

My programming team, “The Red C” (think Moses), is competing right now as the first team ever from Samford in the ACM Southeast Regional programming competition. Check out the live scoreboard. There are six first time teams here, and the Samford team was the first of those six teams to solve a problem! Way to go Greg, Jonathan, and Bradley!!!

The competition is being held at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, Alabama. Here is a topocreator map of the school with the building where the competition is being held. I am upstairs sequestered in the coaches room with a nice wireless connection. The students are right below working diligently.

View large image with legend Created with beta version of topocreator.com

October 25th, 2008 | Tags: acm, programming | Category: News | Leave a comment