Ack, what happened to July?

• Hank and I hacked with Thomas on his CFD code on KLAT2 to get final performance numbers for the Gordon Bell prize entry.
• Wasted a week with a misunderstanding if the -ARP flag for /sbin/ifconfig. Long story short: -ARP turnes off everything related to ARP for that NIC, including use of any preloaded/constant entries in the ARP cache! What a useless option.
• Hacked on the GA for finding/optimizing FNNs. We now have a better framework for specifying specific communication patterns for the GA to optimize for. Still not much closer to releasing the source :-(
• I took a week vacation to attended MacWorld Expo 2000 with my Dad. I promptly drooled on a G4 Cube. In a way, I wish I didn't already have a G4 Tower!
• Upgraded Odie to gigahertz Athlons and ABIT KA7 motherboards that AMD donated. They are fast, but my 450 MHz G4 still cranks out a few more RC5 keys/sec.
• Upgraded Opus to 500 MHz K6-2 CPUs that AMD donated. This made a very perceptable difference in the speed of the video wall, so I guess VWLib isn't memory bandwidth limited...
• Built and tested one of the AFN000601 boards. Will need to recruit some students to help assemble 20 more to use on KLAT2. Still waiting on one critical part (74LS13 chips) to be delivered.
• The University of Louisville's S+LUG visted the KAOS Lab to get a tour and some assistance with their cluster project.
• The University of Kentucky's UKLUG has begun work on converting a pile of 486's in the KAOS Lab into a usable cluster (Galugtica) for learning/hacking purposes.

So, it was a busy month of July for me. The fall semester is rapidly approaching. But there are still a few weeks left of "no classes". MacWorld Expo 2000 was a fun vacation to take with my Dad (and Mom). While at MacWorld, I met and chatted extensively with Troy Benjegerdes about AltiVec, BlackLab/ YellowDog Linux and parallel computing. Now that the Gordon Bell paper is done, I might have time to try our LINPACK optimizations out on my G4 with AltiVec.