Statement of Intent! And, my Gastric...

1-0 to Liverpool!

And the tension almost did my gastric.

This certainly equals the tension on 25-May-2008. That time, LFC had to protect the 3-3 score, against AC Milan in the UCL final, to force the penalty. This time, LFC had to protect our 1-0 lead for 80+ minutes.

Though it's “protecting”, but we didn't just park a bus in front of our penalty box. We still attack, playing one-touch football. XA almost doubled our lead; it's very unfortunate that this freekick hit the post.

All in all, what a statement of intent from LFC to the rest EPL clubs!

Ps. JC's scouse accent is surely very hard to discern :)

King of Comebacks!

So, that's M'boro (or “mie rebus” aka soupy noodle, according to S'porean), Marseille, MU, MCity, and today Wigan.

Surely now LFC is seen as glowing with an unbeatable magical aura. It's like in Hollywood action movies, where no matter what happens, the protagonist just keeps getting up to finish the scripted happy ending.

On the down side, continuous dramatic comebacks (plus RB persistant refusal to make changes before the 70th minutes) really does no good to my heart. Also, I think I really need to start calming down a bit during the equalizer or the scoring of the winning goal. It's late and it's definitely not good to wake up a few good souls who've probably in their level N4 of sleep.

Special mention to XA who is building a growing number of victims in his repertoire: NV (vs MU), TC (vs Evtn), PZ (vs MCity), and AV (Wigan). Now, who perpetuates the rubbish myth that he can't handle the hustle-and-bustle of EPL?

GotoBLAS on Intel Core Duo + SS12

GotoBLAS is renowned as the fastest BLAS library. It has been used by many supercomputing sites to run HPL, the infamous benchmark that determines their position in the Top500.

I've had a chance to test the combo of Goto+HPL using Sun's compilers (Sun Studio 12 aka. SS12) on OpenSUSE 11.0 x86 (i.e. 32-bit version). The machine is a laptop: IBM Thinkpad R60 with Intel Core Duo T2400 1.83GHz. [In the past, I've had relied on ACML when building HPL for AMD platforms.]

Here're the steps to build GotoBLAS on the abovementioned environment, assuming that the source archive has been extracted and you're in the source-code directory:

1. Open detect in a text editor, then change FCOMPILER=NULL to FCOMPILER=SUN
2. If your SS12 is installed in a non-standard directory (e.g. /tmp/sunstudio12), then open Makefile.rule in a text editor. Then, apply the following two changes:
   
   • ifeq ($(F_COMPILER), SUN)
     COMPILER_F77 = f90
     into
     ifeq ($(F_COMPILER), SUN)
     COMPILER_F77 = /tmp/sunstudio12/bin/f90
     
   • ifneq ($(OSNAME), SunOS)
     SUNPATH = /opt/sunstudio12
     into
     ifneq ($(OSNAME), SunOS)
     SUNPATH = /tmp/sunstudio12
     

And that's it! Should you wonder that I forgot about the C compiler: no, I don't. Leave it to use gcc.

Note that on this particular environment, -fast must not be used as it results in a floating-point exception on one of GotoBLAS's self-tests. YMMV (your mileage may vary) though.

Note2 that -xtarget=native is safe (again, it has to be qualified as “only on this particular CPU architecture”).

In addition to the built-in self-tests, another test was to build HPL with libgoto.a (and CT8), and then run the xhpl. And, not surprisingly, everything went smoothly; no further hiccups or whatsoever.