Penultimate Reality

You’ve no doubt heard of the phenomenal computational capabilities of modern graphics cards. For problems in certain domains, their performance can be rather extraordinary, and distributed computing is one field that is attempting to take advantage of it. Folding@Home has been testing a GPU-based client for some time, and over at GPUGRID has been working to bring the enhancements to a BOINC project.

However, a few days ago, the good folks at distributed.net released the first public beta (for x86-64 Linux) of a GPU client for NVIDIA cards using the CUDA platform. The client currently only supports the RC5-72 project and not OGR, which might be disappointing for some, as the RC5-72 project is of dubious scientific or mathematical value, though there is a prize involved.

In any case, I have been testing the client over the past few days on my NVIDIA 512MB GeForce 8800 GTS and here are my observations:

The thing is ridiculously fast. My Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 overclocked to 2.97Ghz is already quite fast, but the graphics card completely smokes it. Using all four cores, the Q6600 will average about 800 RC5-72 blocks per day. If utilized all day on my aforementioned graphics card, the CUDA-enabled client would complete approximately 6200 blocks. That’s almost eight times as fast. Granted, these GPUs can only be used in some problem domains, but they clearly have an advantage in those areas where they are well-suited. Nonetheless, there remain a few issues that will prevent me from using the client to its full capacity.

First, the client pegs one of the CPU cores at 100%, meaning you’re trading one CPU for the performance on the GPU. All things considered, this is probably a fair trade, though if you like to run several different projects, it’s more limiting. (RC5-72 probably isn’t interesting enough to me to run on my CPUs at the moment, though that can change at any moment.) At GPUGRID, they seem to have been able to reduce the CPU load caused by the client to a few percent on Linux, so this problem may yet be solvable to some degree.

Perhaps more importantly, however, desktop performance becomes quite sluggish while the client is running, to the point of being unusable. Perhaps I bring this upon myself by using maximized applications on a 1920×1200 screen, but it’s an issue nonetheless. A separate test client (using 64 threads instead of 128) made available by one of the authors was slightly better in this regard, but probably not enough for me to tolerate. However, this problem in no way prevents me from running the client while I sleep or am otherwise not at the computer, which can add up to a lot of hours a week. (The past couple of days, I’m averaging about 4000 RC5-72 blocks per day.)

So, while the client is somewhat rough about the edges, the performance enhancements it brings make the whole distributed computing arena about to become much more interesting. My only hope is that other suitable projects begin to adopt the technology. I know not all of them will be able to take advantage at this stage (especially those requiring double-precision floating point math), but it’s still something to look forward to in the future. It’s an exciting time for the technology enthusiasts of the world.

In a strange turn of events, I found the motivation to get this done. The MOD is now fully-updated for phpBB 3.0.0 (assuming I didn’t make a glaring error, that is). Since there were no major problems with the alpha releases, I have gone ahead and moved on to beta status. This period will likely last a few weeks as I attempt to shake out any lingering bugs.

You can, as always, find this latest release at the Custom Title MOD web site. Please test this version and let me know if you have any problems, concerns, or suggestions. And if you find it useful, please consider donating. Thanks.

I’m a few days late on this, but I’d like to be the 738,535th person to congratulate the phpBB Group on the long-awaited release of their fantastic forum software, phpBB 3.0.0. It’s been an incredibly long nearly six-year road, with a number of bumps along the way. I’ve been following the development of phpBB since late 2001, and the one thing I can tell you is that pretty much everything that could go wrong did go wrong. (A little hyperbole never hurts.)

Even so, the changing team persevered, and here, as an early Christmas (or whatever December-ish holiday you choose to celebrate) present, we find ourselves with the gold version of an excellent piece of software. I’m still not an incredible fan of flat-style messaging, and phpBB certainly has areas where it could improve. Nonetheless, it’s exciting to see all the hard work finally come to fruition.

As both a (pretty much former) MOD developer and a user, my greatest hope is that with this release, the team is able to put the problems of the past behind them, and work towards far more frequent releases. Even I would find myself hard-pressed to continue to support their efforts if the next release is phpBB4 sometime in 2013. (Those of us in the know will recall that what became phpBB 3.0.0 was originally slated to be phpBB 2.2.0, an incremental improvement to phpBB2 itself. My, how things change, with phpBB3 in effect becoming nearly as much of a rewrite as phpBB2 was.)

If you’re looking for good, free forum software, I suggest you download it today. If phpBB’s not your cup of tea, there are plenty of other solutions, and you’ll find an ample list over at Wikipedia.

In a semi-related note, it’s becoming less and less likely that I’m going to find the motivation to work on my Custom Title MOD. As I’ve said before, it’s simply not a feature I’m currently using on any of my sites. It’s possible that could change in the future, but until then, I’d fully support any other developer who wants to update my alpha version for 3.0.0 and maintain and support it. Or write it from scratch, if you want. If the feature’s in demand enough, I’m sure it’ll pop up somehow. (I still have hope that certain features in phpBB 3.2 will make such a MOD completely unnecessary. We shall see.)

I’ve released alpha 2 of my Custom Title MOD. This version fixes some missing code that wasn’t ever added to alpha 1 by mistake. Upgrade instructions for those of you who have already installed can be found at the phpBB forums.

It’s finally here! The very first alpha of the Custom Title MOD for phpBB 3.0.x. This is still an early release, and may have some serious bugs that do all kinds of horrible things to your forum. Then again, it works just fine on my test installation, but converting a diff into an installation script isn’t exactly foolproof.

In any case, test it out, and let me know if it works or not. If testing is favorable, we could see a beta, release candidate, or even a final release within the next couple of weeks. Though I probably won’t release the final 2.0.0 version until phpBB 3.0.0 goes gold.

By the way, there aren’t really any new features since 1.0.3. There is one major change, in that the permissions system of phpBB 3.0.x is utilized in order to control who can edit her title and who can’t.

With phpBB3 well into its release candidate cycle, it’s apparent to most observers that the final release can’t be far behind. As some of you may be aware, I’m the author of the popular Custom Title MOD. The only problem, of course, is that it’s designed for phpBB 2.0.x, which is, while not obsolete, going to be the second choice for most webmasters, I’d guess.

I’ve noted some small interest for a phpBB3 version of the MOD, and given time this week, I’m going to try to look at working something up. Featurewise, it’d be mostly the same, but if you have good ideas, feel free to share them here. One change is that the ability to edit one’s own custom title would likely be a user permission that you could allow or deny. This would mean that you could restrict access to certain groups only, for instance. I’m not sure how the required days/posts ties into this, and it may just be a global setting, perhaps with one additional user permission to the effect of “Can ignore required registration days/posts requirement.” I’ll have to see, but there’s no guarantee I’ll find time.

If anyone else out there manages to write a MOD with similar functionality, let me know, and I’ll be glad to add a link. I don’t personally care about the feature myself, anymore, but I know it can be popular.

It’s come out slowly over the past couple of weeks that Mozilla Thunderbid is looking for a new home, as the Mozilla Foundation wants to concentrate more on promoting Firefox. I’m not entirely sure what to think of this, but it does bring up something that’s bothered me about certain free software projects out there.

Mozilla’s been mired down in what I’m going to call corporate bloat for a long time. Since it ultimately came from Netscape, this is more due to its history than anything else. The creation of the Mozilla Foundation only cemented this further, which leads to the biggest problem I see with both Firefox and Thunderbird: their development cycles are incredibly slow. Then we move to large businesses (or the so-called corporate world) where development cycles are on the order of a couple of years. For instance, we see a new version of Windows about every 3-5 years. We’ve seen a new major version of Firefox every year or so, I suppose. For the end user, this can be somewhat slow, but maybe it’s okay for most people. In particular, it helps to provide a more stable platform, and like it or not, that is an important thing for many people and businesses.

Finally, we move down to small groups that tend to follow the “release early, release often” mantra, where you can sometimes see major releases every couple of months. Staving off major feature improvements for a few months doesn’t bother me so much, but sometimes simple bug fixes can hide in the Mozilla (other projects aren’t immune, of course) repository for a year or more before it finally sees release. It’s kind of disappointing, really, but I wouldn’t entirely blame Mozilla. Large, mature projects tend to fall into this trap a lot, and while the Linux kernel isn’t incredibly large, it isn’t small either, and it seems to have maintained a rapid development cycle.

In any case, I wish Thunderbird well, wherever it ends up, since I do currently use it as my primary mail client. But something tells me that with regard to web browsers and e-mail clients, it’s time to get back to more rapid, agile releases that truly innovate. But maybe I’m just too wed to the bleeding edge… that’s life, I suppose.

I’ve been fascinated by distributed computing for several (perhaps as many as six or seven) years now, running a variety of various projects on various computers. One project that I’ve been involved with for a long time is distributed.net, a project whose primary claim to fame was working on various RC5 cracking efforts over the years. In recent years, the project has stagnated in ways, working primarily on two projects with dubious value.

RC5

RC5 is a particular encryption scheme for which RSA Laboratories had sponsored several contests to crack messages encrypted with various key lengths. Distributed.net previously cracked both the 56-bit and 64-bit variants, and is currently working on the 72-bit variant. The only real value here is measuring the current ability of a large network of computers to brute-force crack an encryption key. We know that we can do it, and we also know that cracking 72 bits is beyond any practical purpose for now. This could, of course, change quite rapidly (there is some interesting work being done on GPU and FPGA cores that may push the limits extensively).

OGR

OGR, or optimal Golomb rulers, is a project to find the shortest Golomb rulers of various lengths. The project is mildly interesting, doesn’t take too incredibly long, but is of dubious practical value.

In the beginning, both of these projects were interesting enough on their own. Today, however, with the wide array of projects available via the BOINC platform (which I run on a few of my machines), these projects are looking more like a waste of my valuable CPU cycles. I continue to assist, however, as the end of OGR-25 is in sight (a few months at most, by my estimation) and I’d hate to abandon it so near the finish line. I have no problem keeping RC5-72 active, even though RSA Laboratories has ended the challenges, simply as a barometer of what kind of processing power is currently available. I would, however, like to see some new and interesting projects. I’d love to come up with one on my own, but I don’t currently have any ideas that need that kind of processing power, are easily breakable into small parts, and are of value to the world community at large.

I’m not sure there’s a point here, but it’s not like I need one all the time.

Today was perhaps a big day in the open-source world, with at least two major releases that I’m aware of. The Mozilla project released version 2.0 of Mozilla Thunderbird, their premier e-mail application. Perhaps the bigger story, however, is that Ubuntu released version 7.04 of its popular GNU/Linux distribution.

As far as Thunderbird goes, the release is sort of lost on me. I’ve been running betas and release candidates for at least a month or two, so I can no longer recall what the major changes were for me. Since I tend to use it as little more than a glorified IMAP client, I don’t necessarily use a lot of the more interesting features like spam detection or message tagging.

I installed Ubuntu last night in a virtual machine, and I’m becoming more impressed with the distribution with every release cycle. It’s definitely a very polished system, and one of the first things I noticed was the restricted drivers manager. Since the virtual machine doesn’t require any restricted drivers, I didn’t have the opportunity to try it out, however. Even so, the six month lull between major releases is perhaps the biggest reason I would stray away from Ubuntu personally. I know backports can help somewhat with that, but especially with major libraries, that doesn’t help so much. Maybe I just need to lose the bleeding-edge mentality. Nonetheless, it’s an impressive release, and I expect it’ll only continue to get better. I’ll probably be staying with Gentoo myself for now, but I’m certainly open to change.

Over at arsgeek, there’s a brief article on some things you might experience when transitioning from Windows to Linux. I traveled that road myself a few years ago, and I can relate to some of those experiences, many of which might trip up the person considering switching operating systems, or at least dabbling. I’d like to talk about a couple of those in particular, and then I have another one to add to the mix, that sort of sums up the whole process. I’d suggest you read the article over at arsgeek first, so you have some idea what I’m talking about.

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