About ROTANG

FORTRAN variable naming, Less is More, M4 save us!, etc.


ROTANG?
 The word ROTANG comes from the NCAR/PSU MM5 mesoscale atmospheric model where ROTANG is the ROTational ANGle variable used to compute solar declination: 
      ROTANG=-ATAN(DLONG/DLAT*COS(DEGRAD*XLATD))            INIT.181
Many of us parallelizing the model liked the variable name, and over time it has adopted a personality of it's own. Jace A Mogill bought the domain name in late 1999, largely as a site to distribute his freeware from. Jace came up with the phrase "ZOOM! NOT BOOM!", but stole "World's Finest Optional Software" from Frank Zappa's "World's Finest Optional Entertainment".

For a while ROTANG claimed to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Evil Empire Software, but was later told to cease and desist by a web portal company which claimed it, too, was Evil Empire Software. That company doesn't appear to exist anymore.




What?
 ROTANG uses heterogenous parallelism techniques such as pipelining and multithreading to reduce execution time of applications which have little to no data parallelism. ROTANG uses the M4 macro language pervasively to generate complex ANSI C programs.

All ROTANG software is (supposed to be) portable to POSIX operating systems with ANSI compilers, regardless of architecture (ie: word length and endian neutral). ROTANG uses Macs on the desk and lap, keeps Linux boxes in the closet, and is a supporter of all multithreading hardware which is brought to market.




Why?
 Most ROTANG software is born from necessity, such as HMV, which was developed in response to bloated visualization packages which were not interactive and too difficult to do simple things (like arithmetic difference) with. Some ROTANG software is research which escaped the lab, such as Hum and IOTA. ROTANG also tried to get rich quick like all it's dot-com neighbors, but you'll need to ply Jace with two drinks to hear that story.



Emperor?
 ROTANG is a one-man show, so all the software on this site was written by Jace A Mogill, as was all of the HTML which you are currently experiencing. Jace does the bookkeeping, the cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Jace plays the bass guitar and the Chapman Stick, collects LPs, and is an avid student of rock music. Listen to his former band, Frame By Frame. Or get your vinyl LP records converted to digital MP3s. He lives in the Crown Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, USA.

Jace does not "blog", but has been known to enshrine Spam and lost email.
As of sometime in April, a quasi-blog like thing of mostly pictures has appeared, but no promises to annontation, or completion.

Jace went around the world -- check it out. Also, one of Jace's climate modeler friends runs a blog about media on climate, called ClimateSpin .




Less is More?
 ROTANG believes "Less Is More", in all aspects of software, and strives to have the interface become the task. ROTANG frowns on overabitious projects which solve all problems by writing more code or specifying frameworks of components of defective bloatware.




When?
 ROTANG happens in copious free time, since Jace has a day job at Mitrionics, where he is Chief Cook and Bottle Washer in North America. Curiously, one of his current duties is identical to his previous job: applications analyst porting and parallelizing applications one week a month in support of users from a user site smartly located between a water treatment facility and a mility airport. On any given day, Jace may be in an airplane, writing some documentation, visiting a customer, looking for office space, losing a fight with his scanner or Cingular 8125 (which is truly the worst spent $350 ever).

Jace is known for doing parallel IO things (writing IOTA, parallelizing fsck(8)), looking up strange user code in the standards books, and comparing FORTRAN to restructured intermediate compiler states. Jace worked at Tera Computer Company, which built the MTA . The MTA masks latency from instruction issue and it's global flat memory by implementing 128 hardware threads per processor, each of which can issue up to 8 instructions speculatively, for a total of 1024 in-flight instructions. Thus, data caches are not needed because latency to distant memory can be completely masked by exploiting parallelism. The MTA's automatic parallelizing compiler is ROTANG's favorite programming tool -- moreso than M4!


ROTANG endorses the MTA, seen here in it's second generation form factor, featuring a 220MHz clock rate and HIPPI-800 I/O. Tera engineers are seen here examining a scanout.



Resume
 Jace A Mogill's Resume


ROTANG -- ZOOM! NOT BOOM! Find out more about who ROTANG is and how it is powered by M4. Emacs? Vi? NO! ED!
ROTANG produces the world's finest optional software.
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