Supercomputing and Some Updates

Supercomputing, Cluster Computing, and Grid Computing. These are all topics I have been interested in for quite some time, though I've never done any actual work on the topics, just some casual browsing for information and ogling pictures of different setups.

Lately I've had my interest in these topics rekindled, and now I actually have the knowledge and means to play around with all of them.  Granted, I don't have the means ($$$) to play in these areas to the extent I would like to, but I can dabble nonetheless.

Over the next few weeks and months I'll be doing some small scale experiments with different High Performance Computing (HPC) models.  Expect to see a few write-ups and updates here as I do this.

Now, onto some updates.  

I've been taking classes for most of the summer, and when not in class, I've been enjoying my time off.  Due to this, I've been extremely busy, and haven't had time to update this blog as much as I wanted to.  I don't want to be one of those bloggers who apologizes constantly for not updating, so I'm not going to apologize.  If you want me to update more often, bug me about it, otherwise, deal with it.

Another area I've been spending some time playing around in is different programming languages.  Back in the day (I love sounding old), I dabbled in PHP in addition to writing HTML and CSS by hand.  It's been a couple years, and lots of things have changed in all these areas.  These past few weeks I've been doing some basic work in more languages than just Java (what my classes have been on during the past year).  I believe I'm falling in love with programming in Scala, so expect me to post some tidbits (you'll see this word again in a minute!) on these different languages as I work my way through learning them.

In other news, my friend, Miranda, over at Tidbits for Your Wits (She changes this name way too often, so if the link breaks, sorry.  She's promised not to change it again though.) has moved to an updating everyday system of posting.  Not to be left in the dust, I'm going to be moving to a posting at least once a week system, as opposed to my current "post when I feel like it" system of blogging.

I've also added a new section to the sidebar, called "Currently Reading."  This new feature is going to show to everyone (you guessed it) what I'm currently reading.  I'll try to update it as soon as I move on to a new book (or books), but it is bound to fall behind from time to time.  At the end of each book, I'll think about posting a review, if I feel like it.

That's about it, look forward to you all reading my stuff in the near future.

Some Random Updates

I don't know if you've looked at my goldfish lately, but they've gotten much bigger in the past few weeks.  They've grown at a rate that surprised me, to tell the truth.  I mean, don't get me wrong, I knew they'd grow, that's what living things tend to do, I just wasn't expecting it to be quite this fast.  Luckily I was planning to move them to a larger tank soon.  "Soon" just happened to be another thing that snuck up on me faster than expected. All is going according to plan though, so by the end of this week they should be in a shiny new home that is much, much bigger than their current one.  This gives me more freedom in caring for them (since water changes won't be required quite as often), and it also allows me the possibility of a couple more fish.  What fish I'm planning on trying to get is a secret, and it is a little ways off before I make the final decision, but I'm excited nonetheless.

Prime Numbers

Recently I've become fascinated with prime numbers.  I believe it started when I was reading an article on how researchers recently cracked 768-bit RSA encryption.  The past few months have seen me becoming more and more interested in different fields of mathematics, and this is just the latest one to have popped up for me.

For people who don't know, a prime number is a number that is only divisible by one and itself, and one is not seen as a prime number, though it was considered one in the past.  A step further takes you to superprimes, which are prime numbers which have a position in the list of prime numbers that is also a prime number.

Why is this interesting to me?  Honestly, I'm not really sure, but I've been checking books out at the library on number theory and how prime numbers have been found historically among other similar topics.  I don't have a readily applicable use for this knowledge in my own life, but just for kicks I've been using it to write a program that goes through numbers and determines their primality.

I have a very basic version working currently, and my goal is to optimize it as time goes on and I learn more about optimizations that can be made.  Eventually I plan to have it run on multi-core systems, and also determine if numbers are superprimes.  Code for the basic test program will be added to the "Code Corner" page, and this will also be added to my "Projects" page, since I plan to work on this for a while.