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I think he pretty much outclasses everyone here.
I'm like wow, when I look at em.
edit: ... i realized that the link I gave also linked to a ftp server with alot of programs aka certain games that would put my friend in a bad position since a friend of his gave him permission to use said server for ts.
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Look at what? He's got a wired keyboard and mouse, no particularly unusual case mods, no real internal cable management or decoration, and a few fan controls in an internal bay. And a dual LCD setup, but frankly I think that's overkill for his desk. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Actually, my new computer does sort of beat it out because:
1) My company paid for it. 2) When it's too obsolete, they'll get me a new one. 3) When I go to do my work on it, it has everything I need, right there. 4) Everything is in warranty and if it breaks, they come to my house and fix it.
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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You know, it does irritate me that I'm our network admin and my company still doesn't buy me home computers or pay for my broadband connection. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Seriously, Blayne, your friend's machine looks nice, but there are some things he can do that I think would be both functional AND cool. Getting rid of the wires on his desk would go a long way, I think. So would taking the sheet off his case window, and getting some internal cable ties to move most of his cabling off to the side to show off some of that hardware. I'm not sure the fan controls are really all that necessary; one case mod I really like that uses a 5.25" bay is a LCD screen that can be set to display when new email has been received and/or RSS feeds are updated.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Um, there's likely plenty of people here with better setups. Like mine, although I shall not post pictures for ridicule. Or any other reason. Posts: 561 | Registered: Feb 2005
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Fry's has some really nice cabling kits so that you can make the power cables look awesome. I picked up one of those for about $20, had ties and wraps that went with my color scheme. It would look better, but in order to really get the cables wrapped right, I would have had to take apart the power cables. Mistakes while doing that can be...catastrophic...so I just supplemented with blue electrical tape. Looks good enough. You could do this yourself, too.
And of course, it doesn't matter how much you rice your computer up, it's what's under the hood that matters. Otherwise, it's just a Neon with stripes (stripes make your car go faster) and a muffler kit.
Posts: 561 | Registered: Feb 2005
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2.5GHz Quad-core PowerPC G5 16GB 533 DDR2 ECC SDRAM- 8x2GB 2x500GB Serial ATA - 7200rpm QUADRO FX 4500 512MB SDRAM Apple Cinema HD Display (30" flat panel) Apple Cinema HD Display (30" flat panel) Bluetooth Module + AirPort Extreme Card 16x SuperDrive DL (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW) Fibre Channel PCI Express Card (w/ SFP-SFP cable) Apple Wireless Keyboard & Mouse - U.S. English Mac OS X - U.S. English iWork '05 preinstalled Accessory kit
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I bet my work machine has more juice than your friends' computer.
Dual 3.8 GHz Pentium 4 x64, 2 GB very nice RAM (never bothered looking up the clock speed), PCIe, high end SATA, the works.
Only things he might top me in are graphics card and sound card, and I don't need good ones of either of those (I'm doing memory-intensive java development).
Not a bad rig for a part time job Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Of course, I never cared much for the competition. I'm still running a couple of old computers for tasks I don't want running on my main machine.
Posts: 1813 | Registered: Apr 2001
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How do dual processors decide who does what? Do they just alternate instructions and share results back to home base somewhere (that doesn't even make sense).
I just don't get the parallel processing thing. Something has to schedule the work and dole it out. Is there a master/slave relationship?
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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I'm not so big on the lit cases, myself. But then, I'm a Mac user.
Bob, I think there's a misconception implied in your post: The processor is not what "schedules work" in a single-processor system. Colloquially, the processor is often described as being the brain of a computer, but this isn't really true. Rather, the processor is analogous to the engine of a car. Loosely put, the driver of the car is software -- the operating system's scheduler. In a dual-processor and/or multi-core system, the scheduler simply has more options in terms of who to assign work to.
For instance, I have a dual-processor system, and I generally run Folding@home in the background regardless of what I'm doing with the computer. Folding@home reports 100% CPU usage, but the actual load is distributed across both processors (meaning each processor spends 50% of its horsepower on Folding@home). Folding@home is unaware of this, it's the operating system that handles it.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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twinky: interesting, they must have updated the FAH client, it used to be if you wanted to fold on both processors on a dual mac you needed to run two clients.
Bob: each application runs using one or more "processes". Each process is a fairly self-contained thing, and all the info the process needs to do its work is associated with the process. At any given time, a CPU can be consuming the work that needs to be done for one process. The OS tells each CPU when to deal with which processes. A common approach is to assign a process to a specific CPU, and have it switch off with the other processes sharing that CPU, and to try to keep the top two processing intensive tasks on separate CPUs.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Bob is not a sheltie by any means! My sheltie takes offense at that. He's a lab more likely, a big, sweet puppy dog lab, with long black hair that rides a motorcycle, or maybe a Newfie, though I'm not sure the personality matches (the last time I was around a Newfoundland I was 4 and terrified to see a dog that outweighed my pony).
Posts: 5362 | Registered: Apr 2004
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twinky: I'm more inclined to think that FAH is using 100% of one of your processors and you are really doing all your other computering on the other processor.
I had my Mac part of Stanford's Xgrid project and it ran 2 processes on my box (dual 2.0) and I hardly ever noticed a hit.
If it counted, I could say that my lab is more uber computer than anyone's here. I've got them running Xgrid and the combined CPU power is around 500 GHz (of G5's). Can't use it to speed up Photoshop though. So it doesn't really count. Posts: 1209 | Registered: Dec 2003
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quote:I'm more inclined to think that FAH is using 100% of one of your processors and you are really doing all your other computering on the other processor.
Activity Monitor doesn't divide its load reporting by processor, hence the 100%... but the system monitoring utility that I actually use does.
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A litte utility called AquaMon that was written by a guy on another forum I frequent, Ars Technica. Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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human: if we're counting any computers where we work, I work in a building with a bigger supercomputer than that .
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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But do you get exclusive use of it? Hehehe. Because I'm the one developing my grid, well, so far I'm the only one that really uses it.
Besides the students of course. So it isn't really a super computer. Just spare cycles left over from the students. But it is enough that I've gotten in the hobby of rendering super high quality animations that otherwise would be impossible.
Posts: 1209 | Registered: Dec 2003
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Among others, this is in my building: 42 PowerPC970 JS20 blades, each with 4GB memory, combined with 32 1.3 GHz Power4 processors, each with 6GB memory. Its all one cluster.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Its this huge rotunda with robot tape readers that zip around super-fast and read tapes from the gigantic storage racks as they're accessed by users. Its too big to backup, so they just replicate it up at IUPUI (since we're connected on the iLight, which is part of the fiber backbone for Internet2, its no big deal to do that).
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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I agree with fugu that the MDSS is awesomely cool. It combines Internet2 with robots and sci-fi architecture. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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My BIL works at EMC and he had a lot of really cool computers...he use to be a R&D tester, and got to run all sorts of environmental tests on all sorts of computers to see how they would hold up.
I like my computer, it is almost 2 years old now and still handles anything I ask of it, and can run anything I have tried to run.
It isn't Uber by any stretch though...
Not too bad considering I knew almost nothing about computers before I began researching them to but one. Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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Yes, yes. Let's gawk at the nice, shiny, and black computer. But then move on and discuss ... decor. Wires everywhere! Horrendous. No, darling, it simply won't do!
Posts: 43 | Registered: Oct 2005
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