Wenming's Big Data and Big Compute Blog

Any Intro to Unix class teaches students about the beauty of fork() exec(), the two classic calls that allow a user to create a child process. While creating processes on Unix systems are common, creating new processes under the win32 API is a very expensive...

The Microsoft HPC solution comes with an enhanced MPI stack. For sure, it is not the only MPI stack that runs on windows. ANL has an mpich2 mpi stack, so does HP. How does MSMPI differ from the ANL one, of which it is based on? 1. MSMPI comes in both...

The download is available on connect.microsoft.com. You'll have to get a "liveID" using your email address, if you haven't gotten that already. The download process has 3 steps: 1. Search for windows HPC under CONNECTION DIRECTORY, SERVER, then HPC (at...

First, let me explain what Windows HPC is all about. Windows High performance computing team has produced two versions thus far. Their first version is called Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server. It is a very basic solution to the traditional HPC...

Dynamic libraries also known as shared libraries allow the same library to be used by multiple programs at the same time. Dynamic libraries work slightly different on various platforms. Here’s a quick summary of how they work on the three major platforms...

As promised in the previous blog, I have prepared a walk through to get you started on programming python on windows. This is a quick walk through of installing Enthought's Python scientific packages on windows. This bundle includes Python 2.5.2, NumPy...

Why Python? In the scientific community, python is becoming the de facto scripting language. The obvious reasons are: 1. It is accessible, download and install in minutes. 2. The syntax is simple, just about anyone could program, read it. 3. It is dynamic...

This is the final post of the simple HPC Math series I am composing. The previous two posts were on linear, and nonlinear solvers. Just like nonlinear solvers depend on linear solvers, time stepper solvers will depend on the previous two building blocks...

Nonlinear solvers are essentially solving a system of nonlinear equations. X^2 + x -1 =0 is a nonlinear equation. As we recall from Calculus 101, to solve these equations, one has to use some variants of Newton’s method because it has fast convergence...

We recently had a company called Simulia visiting us at a deep dive lab. Their product, Abaqus, a commercial software package for finite element analysis prompted me to quickly brush up on my numerical computation knowledge. After all, you can't compute...

Super computing is crucial for science in the 21st century.  For a long time people have been theorists or experimentalists, those have worked in synergy to develop scientific theory and explain natural phenomenon.  The incredible development...