On the subject of weird and wonderful languages (this follows Aptana and Cloud Computing), comes Haskell and Erlang (is this related to the mathematical distribution [1], or the soft real-time, declarative, functional language for concurrent, distributed systems by Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory [2] or a unit of traffic or Erlang traffic models [3]).

(Soon I will be speaking about "D"!)

IEEE Spectrum: The African Hacker By G. Pascal Zachary

With home-brewed code and a little help from Microsoft, a programmer in Ghana launches Africa's first software empire

The first time I meet Hermann Chinery-Hesse, he is pouring diesel fuel from a plastic jug into an electric generator. I am in the West African country of Ghana, visiting his software company, Soft Tribe Ltd.

Chinery-Hesse is chief of the Tribe. He's made a small fortune writing software, working as a systems architect, and selling computer code to hundreds of businesses in his country of 21 million people. He drives a Mercedes. He wears imported Birkenstock sandals. He hails from a prominent family, was born in Dublin, and went to college in the United States. He could be working anywhere on the strength of his Irish passport, yet he's spent the past dozen years in Accra, Ghana's coastal capital and one-time slave-trade hub.

This steamy December morning, with deadlines looming, his electricity is out, his programmers are idle, and he's feeding fuel to a balky 50-kilovolt-ampere generator—one of the three he keeps at the ready.

Having emptied his container and thus delivered power to his 18 programmers—about one-tenth of all full-time code writers in Ghana—Chinery-Hesse relaxes and, for the first time, acknowledges my presence. Stroking his beard, he quips, "If we Africans are to develop, we must want to get our hands dirty."

From CLUG

This means:
When resolving mirror.ac.za from Johannesburg you should receive the IP address for the Johannesburg Unicast, meaning you will be retrieving from the Johannesburg Server

When resolving from Cape Town, you should get redirected there.

When resolving from behind any ISP that has JINX peering that TENET peers with, you will get the Johannesburg route irrespective of location in the country, due to more bandwidth being available at JINX.

I got together a list of some profiling tools

AMD

CodeAnalyst

Intel

VTune

Linux Today (Feb 15, 2008) by Scott Ferguson has

"SGI is looking to boost its supercomputer profile.
"The Sunnyvale, Calif., company, which continues to rank as one of the leading builders of supercomputers, announced Feb. 14 that it has acquired Linux Networx, a company best known for developing Linux clusters for HPC (high-performance computing)..."

From Science and technology reporter, BBC News by Jonathan Fildes

The chip has four separate cores

The first chip to pack more than two billion transistors has been launched by silicon giant Intel.

The quad-core chip, known as Tukwila, is designed for high-end servers rather than personal computers.

It operates at speeds of up to 2Ghz, the equivalent of a standard PC chip.

It marks the latest milestone in chip technology; Intel released the first processor to contain more than one billion transistors in 2006.

See page 29 of the SKA report on progress at Meerkat.

Of relevance is

Here is a useful company from Inside HPC

Cluster Resources develops workload and resource management software including the Moab Cluster Suite, Moab Grid Suite, and Maui Scheduler. Here’s the 4-1-1.

Who: Incorporated in 2001, Cluster Resources, Inc. began initial development in the mid-1990s by the founders of the company under the name Supercluster Development Group. Before it became Cluster Resources, The Supercluster Development Group created the Maui scheduler and maintained & developed the open source Torque Resource Manager.

From the happy minds who read insideHPC.com What is HPC…and why you care.

There is a great article motivatiing the use of GPUs at a href="http://www.linux-mag.com/launchpad/business-class-hpc/build/4543"> by Jeffrey B. Layton (Tuesday, December 4th, 2007B)