Scientific Computing
Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts & Math
Teaching & Learning Math & Science with Technology
Graphing Calculators, Numerical Methods, Computer Algebra Systems & Linux Clusters
Why Shadowfax? Our cluster is so fast that we named it after the Lord Of The Rings character!
Website once known as CalcPage.tripod.com (1988 – 2008)
Above you will find links to summaries of all my lessons for the past several weeks. So, this blog post serves as a Table of Contents for all my other blogs from class! In addition, CIS(theta) is a summary of my Computing Independent Study class that meets after school like a club. PAEMST details my trials and tribulations regarding my 2012-2013 application for the Presidential Award of Excellence in Math and Science Teaching. Last, but not least, UBUNTU is a collection of blogs about installing, maintaining and teaching with Ubuntu Linux on my desktop and on my students' desktops in class! We had an extra week in Quarter II this year due to Hurricane Sandy. Since we lost 10 school days after the hurricane, we cancelled Midterm Week and February Break. So, this last we of instruction would have been Midterm week....
Our YouTube Wednesday was about Jaime A. Escalante and the movie Stand and Deliver!
preCalculus for Seniors started Chapter 10 on Conic Sections! After a chapter review and test on Chapter 9 on Vectors, we talked about standard form Parabolas! Here's our ScreenCasts and SmartNotes for this week:
preCalculus Honors for Juniors continued Chapter 11 this week. This unit is about Matrices. We talked Cramer's Rule and Matrix Algebra! We also talked about nonLinear Systems. Next week we'll finish the unit with John Nash's Theorem on Linear Programming.
Here's our ScreenCasts and SmartNotes for this week:
AP Calculus BC finished Unit 7 this week. We talked about derivatives and antiderivatives involving ln(x)! We also talked about the change of base formula for logs and logarithmic differentiation! We have a new MCQ Monday next week. We reviewed our first BC Part IA!
Here's our ScreenCasts and SmartNotes for this week:
Teaching Computer Science Honors: Continuing Chapter 5 - Number Systems!
This week we continued Number Systems! We talked about the bin(), oct(), hex() and int() python commands! We even wrote our own bin() function. Here's our ScreenCasts and Code for this week:
Teaching AP Computer Science: Starting CH7+8 Loops and Arrays! We lost so much class time due to Sandy that I may have to use GridWorld to teach certain concepts that I would normally teach from our text. We can cover iteration, arrays, inheritance and polymorphism in a GridWorld centric curriculum. We finished Parts I-III from BoxBug thru Jumper. We're taking a break from GridWorld for now. We're returning to Cay Horstmann's masterful text, Java Concepts. Chapters 7 and 8 are about Loops and Arrays respectively. We are writing a class called Roman right now with static arrays to do arithmetic with Roman Numerals! Then we'll work on the ShoeLace class using the ShowLace algorithm and ArrayLists to find the area of polygons based on vector cross products. Finally, we'll write Chess960.java to generate random chess boards and record chess games with a mix of static arrays and ArrayLists as well a 1D and 2D arrays! We are postponing Take Home Tuesdays. We are not ready for Take Home #4 as yet since its about iteration and loops. After GW Part III we will do some labs on that then some more take homes. There's no new videos this week. We will be posting Roman, ShoeLace and Chess960 on programr.com. Here's our ScreenCasts and Code for this last week:
Above you will find links to summaries of all my lessons for the past several weeks. So, this blog post serves as a Table of Contents for all my other blogs from class! In addition, CIS(theta) is a summary of my Computing Independent Study class that meets after school like a club. PAEMST details my trials and tribulations regarding my 2012-2013 application for the Presidential Award of Excellence in Math and Science Teaching. Last, but not least, UBUNTU is a collection of blogs about installing, maintaining and teaching with Ubuntu Linux on my desktop and on my students' desktops in class!
Our YouTube Wednesday was about Randy Pausch's Last Lecture!
preCalculus for Seniors started Chapters 9 on Vectors in R^3! We talked about 3D Vectors, Scalar Dot Products and Vector Cross Products! Here's our ScreenCasts and SmartNotes for this week:
AP Calculus BC continued Unit 7 this week. We talked about derivatives and antiderivatives involving ln(x)! We also talked about the change of base formula for logs and logarithmic differentiation! We have a new MCQ Monday next week. We reviewed our first BC Part IA!
Here's our ScreenCasts and SmartNotes for this week:
Teaching Computer Science Honors: Starting Chapter 5 - Number Systems!
This week we started Number Systems! We talked about the number of digits and the place holders in serveral bases: BIN, OCT, DEC, HEX! We also talked about converting numbers to and from DEC. So, we're back to our old text and SAGE! Here's our ScreenCasts and Code for this week:
Teaching AP Computer Science: Finishing GridWorld Part III! We lost so much class time due to Sandy that I may have to use GridWorld to teach certain concepts that I would normally teach from our text. We can cover iteration, arrays, inheritance and polymorphism in a GridWorld centric curriculum. We finished GridWorld Part III! This lab is about the Jumper class! We are postponing Take Home Tuesdays. We are not ready for Take Home #4 as yet since its about iteration and loops. After GW Part III we will do some labs on that then some more take homes. Here's our ScreenCasts and Code for this last week:
We tried to isolate our LAN from other DHCP servers but could not. So we still only have individual 3-core SMP boxes running at about 1.2 GFLOPs. We also tried our hand at mpi4py, but we have a way to go in that department too! UPDATE: mpi4py was left out of the current pelicanHPC by mistake! No wonder mpi4py didn't work! Look here: http://pelicanhpc.788819.n4.nabble.com/pelicanhpc-2-9-amd64-and-mpi4py-td4650446.html
We finally had a chance to meet this month in our new PC Lab! We got pelicanHPC to run 3 cores at about 1.2 GFLOPS. We have AMD Phenom IIs. These CPUs are supposed to be quad-cores. It seems one core is dead. Even so, that's not a bad start. However, we could only run pelican in SMP mode. We could not PXE boot any other nodes. We are also looking into Flame Fractals.
******************** NOVEMBER UPDATE
Sorry to say that we had no meetings this month. I was hoping for 3 meetings, but Hurricane Sandy changed everything! We are in a new room where we may be able to try out liveLinux CD based MPI clusters next month. Stay tuned!
******************** OCTOBER UPDATE #2
That was a great meeting today! We burned 8 CDs of Precise Pangolin and reinstalled the whole back row of our PC LAB/Classroom. Many thanx go to Jeremy for coming to vist today and lending a hand! RELATED POST: http://shadowfaxrant.blogspot.com/2012/11/pc-lab-period-of-reconstruction-at.html Here's the steps we followed for a minimal install of the Student Stations (64bit Athlons): Step1: Reboot each Linux box with the current CD. Answer some basic questions about time zone, userid, passwd, no login on bootup, etc. Step2: Reboot each Linux box without the CD. Make sure to configure the gigE cards and proxy server: IP: 10.5.129.x NetMask:255.255.0.0 GateWay: 10.5.0.254 DNS: 10.5.0.254 Proxy: 10.0.0.125 Step3: Configure System Settings as desired (unit circle trig calculator background, no screensaver, etc). Step4: We had to switch Software Sources in the Ubuntu Software Center (edit/source) to Main before this would work: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade Step5: Now, we could use the Ubuntu Software Center to install WINE. Step6: I copied my VTI83 and VTI89 directories from my memory stick to the Desktop. Then, after editing preferences to have VTI open with WINE, I configured each calculator. Step7: I will edit my /etc/crontabs tomorrow.... Step8: We haven't decided what else we may have to install (local SAGE server, JRE, openSSH, openMPI,etc). We'll have to think about that! Here's some info on install fests from prior years: http://shadowfaxrant.blogspot.com/2011/05/2-so-many-hard-drives-so-little-time.html http://shadowfaxrant.blogspot.com/2011/01/then-god-mage-midterm-week-and-saw-that.html http://shadowfaxrant.blogspot.com/2010/06/so-many-linux-distros-so-little-time.html
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OCTOBER UPDATE
We decided to try out the new Ubuntu Linux 64bit Desktop 12.04 nicknamed Precise Pangolin. So we surfed on over to http://www.ubuntu.com and downloaded the latest ISO. We burned the CD, rebooted a guinea pig box and reinstalled it. This should be a simple procedure as we no longer use dualboot or dualnic boxes. However, we ran into a SNAFU right away! Intranet gigE works fine, but we can't get on the Internet? OOPs, we forgot the network proxy. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again! Ubuntu Release History 4.10 Warty Warthog (mammal) 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog (mammal) 5.10 Breezy Badger (mammal) 6.06 Dapper Drake (bird) 6.10 Edgy Eft (amphibian) 7.04 Feisty Faun (mammal) 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon (mammal) 8.04 Hardy Heron (bird) 8.10 Intrepid Ibex (mammal) 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope (mythical beast) 9.10 Karmic Koala (mammal) 10.04 Lucid Lynx (mammal) 10.10 Maverick Meerkat (mammal) 11.04 Natty Narwahl (mammal) 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot (mammal) 12.04 Precise Pangolin (mammal) 12.10 Quantal Quetzal (bird) release: 10/18 Guardian, our ssh server, is running 10.04 32bit. Guardian has a dualcore 32bit intel Xeon processor with 2GB RAM and a 512GB RAID drive. Caprica, our ftp server, is running 10.04 32bit. Caprica has a dualcore 32bit intel Xeon processor with 2GB RAM and a 512GB RAID drive. Shadowfax, our teacher station, is running 11.10 32bit. Shadowfax has a dualcore 64bit amd Athlon processor with 2GB RAM and a 256GB hdd. We use a 32bit OS here as SmartNotebook doesn't run on 64bit.... Alpha-Omega, our student stations, are running 11.04 64bit. These Linux boxes, like Shadowfax, have dualcore 64bit amd Athlon processors with 2GB RAM and a 256GB hdd. We are only upgrading Alpha-Omega to 12.04 (or 12.10 if it's available when we upgrade in a couple of weeks). We are also waiting for a hardware upgrade for Alpha-Omega to amd quadcore Phenoms!
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SEPTEMBER UPDATE
We had our traditional first organizational meeting: (1) Wreath of the Unknown Server: We visited our first ssh server, Colossus, which is still in the switch room though dormant. I set it up for the first time in 1995 running Slackware Linux. Colossus ran for 12 years straight, 24x7 never having to shut down, reboot or even have anything re-installed! Colossus would not die. We finally just replaced Colossus with a dual-core Intel Xeon box complete with a RAID drive running 1TB. Old Linux boxes never die, they just fade away...
(2) Display Case Unveiled: We took down a ton of fractal prints and ray tracings from Room 429 to the 2 cases on the 1st floor near the art wing. We decorated both cases as best we could and left before anyone saw us. Must have been gremlins. (3) Recruiting 2012: We decided that we did not have a good pool of candidates to recruit more CIS(theta) members for this year's Geek Squad, so we tabled that topic. (4) Planing 2012: Next meeting would have been 9/28 but that's Yum Kipur. So, we have to wait another 2 weeks after that for 10/10 at which point Ubuntu Precise Pangolin 64bit release 12.10 Desktop Edition should be available for a mini install fest. After that, we may use bootable cluster Linux CD distros to learn MPI. ==================================
