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Google X Lab Launches Internet-beaming Balloons
June 15, 2013 8:16 pm | by Martha Mendoza and Nick Perry, Associated Press | News | Comments
Google is launching Internet-beaming antennas into the stratosphere aboard giant, jellyfish-shaped balloons with the lofty goal of getting the entire planet online. Eighteen months in the works, the top-secret project was announced in New Zealand, where up to 50 volunteer households are already beginning to receive the Internet briefly on their home computers via translucent helium balloons that sail by on the wind 12 miles above Earth.
New Material State Reverses Laws of Physics
June 19, 2013 6:18 am | by Tona Kunz, Argonne National Laboratory | News | Comments
When you squeeze something, it gets smaller. Unless you’re at Argonne National Laboratory. At...
Purdue Fastest Campus Supercomputer in the TOP500 for Third Year
June 19, 2013 4:17 am | by Steve Tally and Greg Kline, Purdue University | News | Comments
For the third year in a row, Purdue University has confirmed its lead in the rarified realm of...
2013 International Supercomputing Conference Opens in Historic, Modern Leipzig
June 18, 2013 7:53 am | News | Comments
The 2013 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’13) opened its 28th year in the city of...
Maths Get Traffic Moving
June 19, 2013 4:42 am | by Tim Garoni, Monash University | News | CommentsMathematics may not be the first thing your mind turns to when you are caught in a traffic jam. Yet mathematics holds the key to understanding how traffic congestion develops, and how to prevent it. Perhaps one of the best known (and most surprising) mathematical results concerning how traffic flows around a network is Braess’s paradox.
Diatom and Amoeba Together
June 19, 2013 3:50 am | by Nikon Small World | News | CommentsThis 400x photo of cymbella (diatom) together with cochliopodium (amoeba) was an Image of Distinction in the 2012 Nikon Photomicrophotography Competition. Wolfgang Bettighofer of Dataport in Kiel, Germany produced the photo using differential interference contrast.
Strong Gains for Co-Processors and Big Data at HPC Sites
June 19, 2013 2:52 am | News | CommentsThe proportion of high performance computing (HPC) sites employing co-processors and accelerators more than doubled during the past two years, and a surprising two thirds of HPC sites are now performing Big Data analysis as part of their HPC workloads, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Study of HPC End-User Sites.
Penguin, Calxeda and Inktank Deliver Large Scale Storage
June 19, 2013 2:41 am | by Penguin Computing | News | CommentsPenguin Computing has announced that it is developing a highly efficient large scale cloud storage deployment with industry partners Calxedaand Inktank. Calxeda is a manufacturer of ARM based SoCs (System on Chip). Inktank is the company delivering Ceph — the massively scalable, open source, software-defined storage system.
Computer Modeling Technique Goes Viral
June 18, 2013 3:25 pm | by Brandeis University | News | CommentsIt's not a hacker lab. At Brandeis University, sophisticated computational models and advances in graphical processing units are helping scientists understand the complex interplay between genomic data, virus structure and the formation of the virus' outer "shell" — critical for replication.
Which Qubit? Distinguishing Quantum Bits
June 18, 2013 12:27 pm | by University of New South Wales | News | CommentsResearchers at the University of New South Wales have proposed a new way to distinguish between quantum bits that are placed only a few nanometres apart in a silicon chip, taking them a step closer to the construction of a large-scale quantum computer. Quantum bits, or qubits, are the basic building blocks of quantum computers - ultra-powerful devices that will offer enormous advantages...
Two NASA Missions Join Images
June 17, 2013 11:58 pm | by Karen C. Fox, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center | News | CommentsTwo or three times a year, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory observes the moon traveling across the sun, blocking its view. While this obscures solar observations for a short while, it offers the chance for an interesting view of the shadow of the moon.
Mellanox FDR InfiniBand with NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA
June 17, 2013 11:36 pm | Mellanox Technologies, Inc. | Product Releases | CommentsMellanox Technologies FDR InfiniBand system has support for NVIDIA GPUDirect remote direct memory access (RDMA) technology. The NVIDIA GPUDirect technology provides application performance and efficiency for GPU-accelerator based high-performance computing (HPC) clusters.
Hadoop on Cray CS300 Cluster Supercomputers
June 17, 2013 11:19 pm | Cray Inc. | Product Releases | CommentsCray's Hadoop system will allow customers to apply the combination of supercomputing technologies and an enterprise-strength approach of “Big Data” analytics to high-value Hadoop applications. Cray cluster supercomputers for Hadoop will pair Cray CS300 systems with the Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop (Intel Distribution) software.
China’s Tianhe-2 Supercomputer No. 1 on 41st TOP500 List
June 17, 2013 9:44 pm | by TOP500 Supercomputer Sites | News | CommentsTianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, is the world’s new No. 1 system with a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark, according to the 41st edition of the twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
Protozoa with Hair
June 17, 2013 7:49 pm | News | CommentsThis 40x photo of Euplotes (a ciliate protozoa) during its final stage of cell division was taken using differential interference contrast. Regelio Moreno Gill of Panama City, Panama was honored with an Image of Distinction award at the 2012 Nikon Small World Photomicrophotography Competition.
Janus-faced Nature of Mechanical Forces Unmasked with Jülich Supercomputer
June 17, 2013 3:47 am | by Julia Weiler, Ruhr University Bochum | News | CommentsThe harder you pull, the quicker it goes. At least, that used to be the rule in mechanochemistry, a method that researchers apply to set chemical reactions in motion by means of mechanical forces. However, more force cannot in fact be translated one to one into a faster reaction. With complex molecular dynamic simulations on the Jülich supercomputer “JUQUEEN” researchers have unmasked the Janus-faced nature of mechanochemistry.
Global Cooling as Significant as Global Warming
June 16, 2013 8:50 pm | by Newcastle University | News | CommentsA "cold snap" 116 million years ago triggered a similar marine ecosystem crisis to those witnessed in the past as a result of global warming, according to research published today in Nature Geoscience. The international study involving experts from the universities of Newcastle, UK, Cologne, Frankfurt and GEOMAR-Kiel, confirms the link between global cooling and a crash in the marine ecosystem...
Gordon: A Non-Conventional Supercomputer
June 16, 2013 12:36 pm | by Jan Zverina | News | CommentsWhen the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of San Diego, Calif., debuted Gordon early last year, the system’s architects envisioned that its innovative features — such as the first large-scale deployment of flash storage (300 terabytes) in a high-performance computer – would open the door to new areas of research.
Scientists Size Up Universe’s Most Lightweight Dwarf Galaxy
June 16, 2013 12:33 pm | by University of California, Irvine | News | CommentsThe least massive galaxy in the known universe has been measured by UC Irvine scientists, clocking in at just 1,000 or so stars with a bit of dark matter holding them together. The findings, made with the world’s most powerful telescopes at the W. M. Keck Observatory.
