Todays Sunday times, carries this article on Cloud Computing in it's headlines, the whole things seems to have come straight out from one of Dan Browns fiction's, and in fact the article fantastically replicates his writing mannerisms specially the apparent creation of INTERNET by CERN. While I don't deny the fact that CERN is the mother of great inventions and is the home of many a Science scholars, but there's something I would like to bring out from my childhood days, a simple instance proving that Grid computing was always there in place and in various levels!!
I remember as a school kid, Dad had bought this HCL busybee 486 machine, Man o Man --- was I happy!!, Dad used to go to office in the morning and I used to go to school, used to come home, and start fooling around with DOS. And then one day, Dad came home with a bunch of windows 3.1 floppies, and finally when it started I was just awe stuck, allthough I knew that switching into VGA graphics mode from interrupt 19h ( read it in Herbert schildt ), I never knew that graphics could explode into such a big mystical thing. From this point ownwards, i started noticing the bottlenecks that my PC started going into. Along this time, there was this guy in my school, who was an UNIX fanatic, matter of fact me, my dad and my buddy were all UNIX lunatics, one day me and my buddy were as usual hiding in my building terrace and puffing away.....(hehehehe, my summer of '99...best days of my life ), when we suddenly stuck upon this concept.....We coupled our PC's mine running on windows, his on Unix( hang on guys I know today this stuff is hopelessly common, and one would say I am talking rubbish, but take this, i and my buddy were about 16 - 17 years old and not brilliant at all, just meagre morsels in the trade ). We did the coupling on serial port, we wrote a terminal program on both the machines....( Oh and what experience I had with turbo C, it rocked....as programming with UNIX was quite simple using GC and Bourne shell ), The whole idea was to take a really really big number kind of a long long long number and get it's factorial.
One may say, any one machine could have done it, but hey c'mon, we were trying to prove somethings!!
We split up the numbers, giving it a 50% processing power on each machine. In fact within 2 weeks we came up with an algorithm to actually break up a huge number into seeds and spread it into the two machines and forget about what the other guy was doing. We moved onto publish the algo, which was kindof adapted by ICS Delhi...Don't even know if they exist anymore ).
One day, in that same period, I came upon an article by Berkeley systems asking for volunteers for sharing their computers over the net, I dont quite remember, but possibly they had embarked on intercepting some extraterrestrial systems, and wanted to process it in real time, the article stuck me....
Then came Peer to Peer computing( Do I have to say anything ).
And then today's article about CERN using the internet for creating a huge Virtual PC for analysing the results of theirs Large Haldron Collider..............I wonder which huge entity God used when he was creating the universe for all the processing power he required......
One thing for sure though, Cloud computing has arrived big time!!
Geo Track
Software Download Links
Version 3.0
http://www.4shared.com/file/148046144/c61366f8/_3__Geo_Track_Setup.html
Changes carried out:
1. Option to save maps retrieved from google maps, for offline use.
2. Direction Estimation provided from current location to destination location.
3. Options such as roadmaps, satellite views, zooming provided for maps.( which can also be carried out offline ).
4. Location can now be tagged on the basis of Text, Street Views and captured map images.
5. The application on startup goes into Cell tower ID polling state by default so as to minimize confusion for some users at the start.
Version 2.0
http://www.4shared.com/file/143478519/fc355dd3/_2__Geo_Track_Setup.html
Changes carried out:
1. Added facility for picture tagging of a location.
2. Location updation rate changed from 2sec to 1 sec.
3. Changed location of log file to be saved to application data folder.
4. Removed bug due to which corruption occured, if software not closed properly.
5. Removed the << >> which was used previously to identify tags
Version 1.0
http://www.4shared.com/file/142717572/ca7dbf31/Geo_Track_Setup.html
Software Description
Geo Track is basically a software to emulate GPS, by using your nearest cell towers. It allows you to tag your location by providing you with the option for storing one or more descriptions of a location in terms of text and/or pictures.After this, your device will display these textual or image desciptions every time you visit these locations. In the longer run, you would be able to upload these maps to a central server, so that users can readily avail these maps for localised information by a one time map download. If you do posses a GPRS connection you could instaneously capture the latitude and longitude information of the particular location or point out your location in real time map, courtesy Google maps©. Every location is classified by a unique ID.
Further you could also view these logs in real time maping software on the PC.
These kind of location tagging techniques, I believe has a huge potential, just as a starting point, let's imagine a suburban city with all the emergency services mapped locally in one of the city based servers, imagine the amount of help we could derive out of this in realtime that is. I really admire google, for the wonderful work that they have done( I am talking of google maps ).
I am also looking for volunteers who are ready to submit the tagged locations, which will then be uploaded onto servers for personal use by people around the world. The next version of the software will have the facility to upload the tagged information onto internet servers. Do write in to somdutta2000us@yahoo.com with your feedbacks.
Diwali Vacations
Had taken a leave of 2 days for Diwali( in all summing it up to 5 days ), wanted to do some soul searching for myself. I was really cranked up with this petrol dispensing pump project, the softwares was already damn complicated for the system, and now it has become more so. Thought I did a good job, but the supporting of this new version is a hell lot more difficult, then actually writing it.....hehehehe
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