BC Lions Game

This evening, I will witness my first game of Football, North American style. The company had four tickets to spare, and I'm one of the lucky ones. I'm excited to see what it is like, and my findings will be put on this blog at a later time. About my broken PS/3: Sony US refuses to repair it, as it is a Japanese model. Sony Japan does not take repairs from outside Japan. This means I will have to fix it myself. I have not been able to open up the console, because it uses a Security Torx. Its a Torx screw with an additional center pin that prevents standard Torx drivers to be used. I ordered a set of Security Torx drivers from Amazon. Let's hope I will manage to fix the darn thing.

Applying for a lease

A quick update on my Vancouver experiences. Sony Talks about our game. 'Who are these Slant Six people?' the interviewer asks. Also, I've applied for an apartment lease. It turned out that there was an apartment available in the Beach Tower that I am in now. First week of July, I will move into that one. What really worried me though, was the tale of a British colleague: His UK to BC shipping took 6 months. Uh Oh. The people here tell me that it should be much faster though. The apartment I will be in is unfurnished, so let's hope the Spartan Life will not be too long. Getting the lease was not a simple matter. They really scrutinize you. You need to prove you are worthy, and they want statements from former landlords, employers, and banks. However, they approved me yesterday.

First Viewing

Today I find myself smack-bang in the middle of the triathlon course. I picked up a newspaper to find an apartment here downtown. I have made an appointment for my first viewing of an apartment. Tomorrow during lunch, I will be checking out Metropolitan Towers. They charge 1400 dollar (1000 euro) for a 1 bedroom apartment. The price sounds not too outrageous, as the going rate for this is between 800 and 2000 dollars, and they claim to be "luxury rental apartments". Housing cost is significant here, but other costs of living seem moderate so far. As long as I have my Lelystad property, I have to keep my costs down though. Especially since I will no longer be enjoying the Dutch mortgage tax reduction. (Stupid idea anyway... encouraging debts, and having 30yr loans that you never pay off, because of the tax incentives).

Screeched

Last night I got drunk with ten of my coworkers. It all started at the end of the day, when a keg of beer entered the office. The session continued in a nice bar downtown. The company's talent coordinator has some talents of her own, as she turned out to be quite a party animal. I guess that I was saved by the fact that the Karaoke bars were already closed. When we went looking for one, I was the only one with a bicycle. To my surprise, when the group took a bus, my bike was clamped to the front of the bus. What a great service by the bus company to cyclists. I tried some Canadian specialties, as there are: beer with tomato juice, screech (rum) and a cesar (cocktail, supposedly having up to 20 ingredients). Rumor has it that the company owns seats at GM place, the hockey stadium, so maybe my Canadian assimilation can be completed soon.

Granville Lunch

The Slant Six office is near Granville Island. The Island offers a large indoor market where a wide range of freshly cooked foods are sold. The prices are low, which makes lunch quite an experience. So much to choose from, you can have a totally different lunch meal every day of the month. The market is next to the waterside, where you typically can have your meal with live music and sunshine in the summer. Today I had a lamb-pita. This weekend I have to put some efforts in getting permanent accommodation. The west-end of downtown, where I'm now, looks to be the best choice.

Vancouver Cycling

Riding a bicycle in Vancouver is a joy. The slopes can give you a nice workout at times, followed by an exciting race downhill again. The cars on the road are really courteous. They are really mindful of the cyclists. As a cyclist here, you go with the main traffic. There are some bike lanes, but often you will find yourself among the fast traffic. So in some ways it resembles riding a motorcycle in Europe. The traffic is pretty efficient as well. I don't understand why there is no congestion downtown, as it is full of high-rise buildings, so it must accommodate millions of people. A true mystery. I checked out the neighbourhood of Keefer Place. I'm not to sure about it. It is closer to the bad parts of town than Beach Ave is. This morning I got my social insurance number from HRSDC.

Bank Account

I now have a Canadian bank account. Getting one was an interesting experience. The CFO of Slant Six had set up a meeting with an account manager from Royal Bank of Canada. They really welcome you with open arms, and take all the time in the world to get to know the new client. I was also introduced to the bank manager. She invited me for their "Client Appreciation Day Party". Whoa... what a difference with the lousy treatment by Dutch banks. I now also have a checkbook, which I need to get used to. Writing and cashing-in checks is something I only know from American television. I need to find permanent housing. On craigslist.com I found this one that I may like. I think I will go check out that neighborhood with my bicycle.

First working day at the office

I had my first working day at the office. This morning I rode in on my new bicycle, which I fitted with two locks, so let us hope the bicycle is still outside the office. I spent the first day with two meetings, and getting to know the development environment. Some colleagues here will be having a combat training tomorrow, with actual ex navy seal people. Wow, how cool is that?

On Canadian soil

I have left Holland for Canada. Yesterday, I arrived in Vancouver where I will be working with Slantsix games as a developer. I just arrived at the office for the first time (I had my interview via webcam) and met the people here. They are a very friendly bunch. The office atmosphere is nice, and it really feels like a game studio, although there are no segways parked here :-) This morning I bought a bicycle to get around town. Some bad news about my PS/3 console: it died. It survived the shipping, as I had played on it here in Canada yesterday evening. Today, it will not boot up. I hope I can get it fixed. About my new employer: they recently announced SOCOM: Confrontation. I need to hunt for permanent accomodations now (currently I'm on 1600 Beach Ave), and get myself a social security number. The trip from Holland started with engine trouble, and me almost missing the connecting flight from London to Vancouver, but the second leg went very well. The plane landed 30 mins ahead of schedule. The Canadian immigration officer was much better than the Berlin staff. I had my workpermit quickly. So far, jet-lag is mild.

Kernel Upgrade

After I upgraded my Cell SDK to version 2.1, I decided it was time to upgrade the kernel as well. Stock releases of the linux kernel are not yet working properly on the PS/3. Also, the 2.6.20 PS/3 kernel that comes with Ubuntu/Feisty would not boot properly for me. The trick is to use GIT to get a development tree as described by Julipedia. I opted to build and install via a proper deb-package. The key here is to get the latest version of kernel-package from Debian's unstable repository, as kernel-package 10.068 has fixed the bug that would mess up make-kpkg commands in GIT source trees. I found that luckily, my ray tracer code would build without problems on the 2.1 SDK. Although I somewhat expected this, as it is standard policy to increase major version numbers when breaking APIs, and this was a minor version number upgrade only. What pleased me less, is that they did not bother to apply the fix I sent to the forums for the triangle intersection bug. The bug is still in there, which is somewhat sloppy I think.

Folding Proteins

Is it not ironic? I work at a super computing center, yet it turns out that world first petaflop/s computer will be housed right here in my living room in Lelystad. Well, at least a part of that machine will be. Expect the first petaflop/s to be reached this weekend, thanks to the PS/3 implementation of the Folding at Home code. Something amazing has happened here... a handful of PS/3's (currently 20K of them) dwarfed the contribution of the 200K regular PCs. As a matter of fact, if all PCs running folding at home were switched off, computational capacity of the folding at home initiative would hardly be impacted. I have to keep an eye on my energy bill though, as the PS/3 consumes 200Watt. At roughly 20 eurocent per KWatt-hour, it is costing me approximately 1 euro per day. The image of this blog-entry shows the Villin protein, that my PS/3 is currently simulating. One last note: the special purpose computer MDGrape-3 claims to have already reached the petaflop/s milestone.

Ray Tracing Progress

I have made some progress with my ray tracing endeavor on the SPU. The renderer now renders coloured triangles as you can see in the image on the right. It is still un-shaded, but it renders using 6 SPUs at 19.5 fps at a 480x480 pixel resolution for a 304-triangle model. I use no spatial subdivision, so all triangles are tested if the bounding sphere is hit by the ray. The triangles are tested 8 at a time though. All operations are performed with two SIMD instructions, that each process 4 32-bit floats. I opted to test 8 at a time as opposed to the more natural 4 at a time, because this way I get more independent operations that can be pipelined properly. I have also implemented an algorithm that tests 8 spheres for intersection in a single go. Spatial subdivision will be a challenge, as I should somehow create batches of 8 to test. I really need to find some extra performance. The ray tracer of Jacco Bikker shows what is possible. Also, how on earth am I going to implement CSG in a SIMD-friendly manner without much branching? I need to study the algorithm of S D Roth. Unfortunately, this paper is not online.

First ray traced image from Cell's SPU

I just created my first ray traced image on a Cell processor (or more accurately: on a SPU of a Cell processor). I ray traced the model you see in the upper right corner of this blog entry. However, that image was created with ivview. My ray tracer output is very sober, because I have not implemented shading, and the output is in ASCII. I am pleased with the code, however, as it is properly vectorized code that shoots 8-rays in parallel on a single SPU. Anyway, here is the image, with the camera head-on with the model's z-axis.

     ************    
     ************    
     ***      ***    
     ** ****** **    
     ** *    * **    
     ** *    * **    
     ** *    * **    
     ** *    * **    
     ** ****** **    
     ***      ***    
     ************    
     ************    

SDK bug squashed

I must be getting up to steam: I just squashed my first bug in the official IBM SDK for the Cell Broadband Engine. In my quest to implement Photon Mapping on the SPU, I stumbled upon this nice little gem in the development kit: the intersect_ray1_triangle8_v() function. This function will do 8 intersection tests in a single go, using optimal SIMD stream lining. However, it did not work, where as the single triangle case did. After fixing the SIMD dot3 define, it ran fine. Also, I have put some assorted development info up on my stolk.org site. My first SPU application is getting nearer. I now have to find out how I can cram photons, pixels and triangles in that really tiny 256Kbyte memory of the SPU.

PS/3 goes retro: PONG using the Wiimote

I have hacked together a Python Game, Wiipong/3 (source available), that lets you play pong on the PS/3 using Nintendo's Wiimote. You simply tilt the controller to move the paddle on the screen. The little game builds upon the wiimote driver for linux, called WMD.

This is all possible thanks to the brave new world, which is rapidly becoming an Open World. A few years ago, I could not have predicted that game console manufacturers would be using open standards, and providing Linux kernels. Maybe Indrema was just ahead of its time.

Some details: the action shot shows a Xubuntu desktop, projected at 1080p with a high end DLP projector (Optoma HD-81). The game uses WMD to interface with the wiimote, and PyGame for the 2D graphics. WMD uses the standard Linux bluetooth stack BlueZ. The Wiimote is sold for 40 euros, and makes a nice interface device for any GNU/Linux system.

My thanks go to Robert Belleman who researches Scientific Visualization and Virtual Reality. Robert suggested doing this hack.

Jumping Platforms

Getting Yellow Dog Linux installed was a lot of fun. But when I wanted to do some serious development, I quickly became stuck with the yum tool, and managed to damage my dependency tree. At first, I tried Fedora Core 6, but when I had that on my hard disk, I decided that I really wanted apt, and not yum. Debian and Ubuntu have not yet provided PS/3 install disks, but there is this neat little thing called debootstrap.

Using this, I could create an Ubuntu edgy installation on a USB memory stick using Fedora. After booting with the memory stick, the same process installed Ubuntu back onto the hard disk again.

So that means that I'm now apt-getting my way towards a robust, powerful OS on the PS/3. Now it is time to start developing for the Cell Broadband Engine and its powerful SPUs.