Parallel Monte Carlo on Beowulf Cluster

My project on parallel computing went quite well.

I implemented 3-dimension embarassingly pleasingly parallel Monte Carlo integration on Beowulf cluster consisting of mainly 6 units i3-540/550 and 10 units 10 E7500 for some extra experiments.


The project code is montice.
The paper (Indonesian): here.


I used Darren Wilkinson's blog which is great reference material with some basic benchmark (here), in which his result showed poor figures due to most likely memory bottleneck on his i7-940XM (which is quite insane CPU on a laptop).

The speedup on 6 units i3 is here:

As the figure shows, single/core dual core performs just ideal and multithreading (3 or 4 cores for each box) only shows 70% performance improvement over the single/dual core operation.

Overheat: daily routine

I forgot to connect CPU fan on my laptop and kept doing my daily routines: browsing, chatting, watching anime, downloading stuff, and remote-controlling an instance of kvm on my lab server. I didn't notice it was overheating up until I felt a little bit audio-video delay on the anime.



Yeah, Crestline-Merom is definitely versatile.

Qt4.x -> Qt5.x: Painful transition

I've been a qt-fanboy since quite some time. When Qt5 is released, I was a happy guy: downloading its evaluation release, trying QML and those swish-swingy widgets for the new UI system, and such.

But lately, it's been more hassle than fun. There are some major programs I use frequently which drove me insane regarding Qt4 to Qt5 transition:

1. mathgl. Though being just ordinary OpenGL based plotting library, its unclear reason to depend on certain version's (Qt4) of QWidget makes it unusable with Qt5 although no major difference on both version which could render mathgl unable to work.
2. VLC. I love this media player because of its just-work design. Again, because of dependecy issue on Qt4 I can't compile this against Qt5. Luckily last September they released this version which work with Qt5, yay!!
3. qbittorrent. Some people has worked on it, though the patches weren't merged to upstream. Wish it'll merged by version 3.1.0.
4. cmake. Still no FindQt5 module, enough said.

Luckily, things for engineering/scientic computing (mostly plotting graphs) which I need most as university student like qwt, qwtplot3d, qwtpolar isn't so much version dependent, so I could still sleep well.