HackingTheUniverse

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The University of Texas at Austin is building a new supercomputer called Stampede, which will be housed in the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Dell servers, Intel coprocessors, and NVIDIA GPUs will comprise the hardware for the linux cluster, which is expected to reach a performance level of over 10 quadrillion calculations per second (petaflop). [...]

It’s no surprise any more that we expect computers to get both smaller and more powerful every year. Most sugar cubes measure about 1 cubic centimeter. Scientists at IBM are working on a cooling system that they think will enable supercomputing capability in a very small form factor. Supercomputers the size of sugar cubes – [...]

This eighteen minute long video offers a step by step demonstration of setting up a high performance cluster with 8 nodes and 64 cores, using Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) service. Screencast: Building a High Performance Cluster with Amazon Web Services – [youtube.com] This video introduces Amazon EC2 and demonstrates how to create and launch [...]

The IEEE recently approved the 802.3ba standard which supports both 40 Gbit/s and 100 Gbit/s transfer rates. Many research teams, both in the academic environment and in commercial business labs are working on terabit technology. Tomorrow’s Internet: 1,000 times faster – [physorg.com] Imagine if all the data traversing the world right now — on long [...]

Ferromagnetic materials can retain a magnetic charge that is “written” to them using a magnetic field. The magnetic charge can later be “read” from the material allowing us to store data on the material. This is how most hard drives, magnetic tape and many other forms of data storage media work. Ferroelectric materials can retain [...]

eZ430-Chronos Wireless Watch Development Tool – [ti.com] The eZ430-Chronos is a highly integrated, wearable wireless development system based for the CC430 in a sports watch. It may be used as a reference platform for watch systems, a personal display for personal area networks, or as a wireless sensor node for remote data collection. EZ430-Chronos – [...]

WBAN wireless networks operating in compact devices that are worn in clothing or embedded into the body will collect and communicate a variety of data, including bio-medical telemetry, personal statistics, haptic feedback control data, cosmetic appearance control data and short range interface I/O with other systems. Groundbreaking Study of Wireless Body Area Networks Made Possible [...]

By using a mathematical algorithm that “unfolds” the cortex and maps brainwave signals, a fairly simple sensor headset can translate the signals into computer commands that can control physical objects. Tan Le: A headset that reads your brainwaves – [ted.com] So the device that you see is a 14-channel, high-fidelity EEG acquisition system. It doesn’t [...]

Red Storm is a massively parallel processing supercomputer developed by Sandia Labs and Cray for the Department of Energy to do advanced simulation and modeling in nuclear weapons research. It is now being rededicated to national security problems including cyber defense, vulnerability assessments, situational awareness and more. NNSA Dedicates National Security Computing Center at Sandia [...]

Intel’s promise to deliver computers with thousands of processing cores takes a big step forward with the announcement of a 48 core CPU that they call the Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC). It claims to use better power management, high speed internal communications and provide good software compatibility. Single-chip Cloud Computer – [intel.com] Overview Intel Labs [...]