Alexander Schmidt Mathematical methods, programming

1.     ICCES 2011, being held in Nanjing, China, during 17-21 April 2011 (www.icces.org). Abstract (or full-length) submission is to be by 15 February 2011, at: http://submission.techscience.com/icces11

2.     ICCESMM 2011, being held in Zonguldak, Turkey, during 6-9 September 2011 (www.iccesmeshless.org). Abstract (or full-length) submission is to be by 1 August 2011, at: http://submission.techscience.com/icml

If you're interested in a scientific project related to the modern computational problems, check out the open PhD positions available at Microsoft at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/global/open-phd-positions.aspx.

Wow, some scepticists were mentioned 2010-12, but nobody predicted that in 2009 we are going to cross the 1 petaflop barrier in computations and the power available today with two supercomputers listed on www.top500.org where one is Roadrunner and another one is Jaguar. 1 petaflop is equivalent to thousand trillion floating point operations per second.

I've being intrigued to find fast algorithms for the prime numbers and the latest advances in this field, because, as you probably know, this is the problem which can be solved using several algorithms known since old times. Despite some shortcuts and several very huge numbers proved to be primes such as Mersenne's Numbers (GIMPS), several other algorithms include Rabin-Miller which is a standard primality test, ancient Sieve of Eratosthenes, and a bit faster Sieve of Atkin. The running time of these algorithms is a logarithmic function, where the Sieve of Atkin FFT implementation computes the result in O(k × log² n). In reality, if you try to find the prime numbers on the latest computer hardware, it still takes a considerable amount of time and the problem is a good candidate for parallelization.

For some scenarios in scientific parallel computations, one may need to configure to run the MPICH on a Windows Vista computer. This includes scenarios when running the cluster on the commodity hardware in the heterogeneous environments.

Say there is configuration according to the following specification:

1. Host - Windows Vista

2. Cluster node - Windows Server 2003

3. Cluster node - Windows Vista

In this configuration, computers 1 and 3 should have additional firewall rules:

1. Go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Windows Firewall with Advanced Security. On Inbound Rules, right click and select New Rule... In the following dialog, enter parameters of the new rule.

Rule Type - Program

Program - in This program path enter: %SystemRoot%\System32\rclumad.exe

Action - Allow the connection

Profile - Depending on your environment, choose the correct check boxes.

Name - Enter rclumad.

2. Now locate the new rule in the list and open Properties dialog. Make sure the Protocols and Ports has the settings as follows:

3. Now you should be able to execute the tasks remotely passing through Windows Firewall.

If you're writing an article or any other paper, make sure you format it according to the style, recognized in the area the paper supposed to  appear. For example, the following styles are available in Microsoft Word 2007

1. APA - American Psychological Association
2. Chicago
3. GB7714
4. GOST - Russian style
5. ISO 690 - ISO standard for bibliographic referencing in documents
6. MLA - Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing
7. Harvard 
8. SIST02
9. Turabian

If you're writing a technical paper, you can stick with either Harvard or APA style.

Since Microsoft Word 2007 does not support Harvard reference style by default, here is a project on CodePlex site which provides XML extensions for Microsoft Word 2007 to enable the support for several styles commonly used in colleges and universities.