Matching AR-15 Gas System To Buffer System, And What Does Covid-19 Have To Do With Brownells?
BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 1 month ago
Brownells on AR gas and buffer systems.
Eh, okay, whatever. I accept what they’re saying for nominal applications, but for fine tuning I think there is more to it than that.
On another but very interesting note, Brownells is assisting in the Covid-19 analysis.
Brownells, an 80-year-old, Iowa-based online firearm, and firearm accessories supplier has joined forces with Folding@Home to lend its excess computing power to help combat the COVID-19 virus sweeping across the globe.
Folding@Home is helping with an international effort to understand the molecular structure of the virus in hopes of finding ways to defeat it. Folding@Home has called on individuals and companies with excess server space and computing abilities to help execute computer modeling simulations to help speed up an otherwise huge and lengthy task.
“Our IT team learned about the Folding@Home project and their work using computer modeling to better understand the molecular and protein structure of the virus,” said Brownells IT Director Curt Graff. “We are committed to helping protect our country by virtue of our personal protection and sustainability products, but we see this as a way to support the international community in a time of significant need.”
Brownells anticipates it will donate at least 1,300 hours to the project and run approximately 200 simulations on behalf of COVID-19 research.
Okay, so this is really cool, and some of you may be confused, so I’ll do my best to explain this.
Processor speed hasn’t significantly increased for many years, but the ability to utilize threaded calculations has. Many PhD theses have been written on “massively parallel” computing, and most high performance computer codes today (that require billions of calculations) are written to be able to utilize thousands of cores (written, of course, for HPC, or UNIX High Performance Computing clusters). In my recent work, I’ve used more than 1400 cores for approximately 20 wall clock-hours for each simulation. That requires a lot of computing power.
Why on earth would Brownells have this kind of computing capacity, you might ask? I suspect, but I don’t know with certainty, that Brownells has these capabilities because of CFD (computational fluid dynamics) and FEA (finite elements analysis) for ballistics and bullet design.
Someone could prove me wrong by calling Brownells and discussing this with them, or I can. It might be interesting to find out. If they don’t have it for those reasons, they have it for some other reason, and it would be interesting to know. A number of large corporations who do advanced computing have access to thousands of cores, as do the national laboratories (who have the largest computers). It was a bit surprising to me that Brownells has access to the kind of computing power that these computer codes will need.
But I think it’s cool. Does some reader want to call Brownells and let us all know?
Either way, it’s nice to see that a firearms giant is helping in the battle against Covid-19. Hey, if Brownells helps find a treatment, do the gun controllers promise not to use that treatment? After all, they wouldn’t want to be in bed with the gunners, would they?
On March 18, 2020 at 12:40 am, Beans said:
All that analysis and other science stuffs, plus one kick-arse inventory tracking program. And with the ability to beat Karen in Accounting when she plays Solo Hearts.
On March 18, 2020 at 7:23 am, Fred said:
Covid-19 Open Research Dataset:
https://pages.semanticscholar.org/coronavirus-research
“a free resource of over 29,000 scholarly articles, including over 13,000 with full text, about COVID-19 and the coronavirus family of viruses”
On March 18, 2020 at 9:12 am, J J said:
Perhaps Googall and Fakebook can stop surveillance of everyone and dedicate those computing resources to the project.
On March 18, 2020 at 11:22 am, Backwoods Engineer said:
Brownell’s has that kind of computing capacity so they can take orders, I suspect. My own company has massive computing racks to manage customers’ data, and the appetite for more is such that we also rent capacity from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
On March 18, 2020 at 4:14 pm, Wes said:
This is very cool. A galaxy ago, long before hackers & firewalls and fiberoptic IP-based networks, I used to leave my modem on at work (at a .gov site) at night. With some simple coordination with the Human Genome Project they would use what little they could of my puny 486’s CPU, just farming out calculations. Farm out the calculations x 10000 or more across the country and maybe some folks make some progress. After awhile I’d come in the next morning and ask the CPU “well, busy last night?”
Neat idea.
On March 18, 2020 at 4:59 pm, Herschel Smith said:
@Backwoods,
“Brownell’s has that kind of computing capacity so they can take orders, I suspect.”
They don’t need computing resources for that. Parallel processing requires computing clusters. Storage capacity isn’t the same thing.
On March 18, 2020 at 5:29 pm, Phil Carson said:
How many in the crony/corporate world have done as Brownell’s?
People pulling together and acting in unity, thats how we win against the bastards trying to destroy our way of life thru economic warfare.
If Brownell’s has taken a lead I’m all for it.
Besides, we have guns…lots of guns.
Used these guys suggestions and products, they worked splendid for my weapons. Very cost effective, reasonably priced.
Check out their ejection mapping diagram. Easy pie to use it. Takes all the guess work out of determining a baseline for choosing the correct spring rate.
They developed a color code system for their buffer springs with detailed descriptions of how they each function.
If you buy a buffer “kit”, they include a bottle of their machine-gun lube with each kit.
https://www.sprinco.com/index.html
Garnered enough info off their product specs on weapon spring technology to modify an XD 45 to run .45 Super. Had to get a few of their different springs and see what functioned properly, learned a lot.
Up graded the bolts on my AR’s for reliability, first with JP’s modified bolt lug design and using Sprinco’s extractor/ejector & pin spring setup.
Basically it is simple reliability mods beyond mil spec standards.
Their site is full of handy information.
On March 19, 2020 at 11:26 am, JFP said:
Eh, its nice of them to donate excess server cpu and gpu time to the cause. Anyone can do it these days on their home machines and not suck up too much power/cpu cycles. Folding @home has been around for 15 years or so, SETI being the first I think back in the late 90s.
Its a competition among some IT nerds. I know of guys who have dropped $5-10k in just the last few years to build up a small network of folding machines since the new AMD threadripper & ryzen cpus came out.
On March 20, 2020 at 5:23 pm, John H Brooks said:
Herschel, You made Don Surber’s HIGHLIGHTS OF THE NEWS #2! Rush Limbaugh and President Trump read his computer column. He put in your name. Congratulations!