Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Google opens data center in Finland cooled with sea water

Here
In the former Harmina paper mill from the fifties. However, paper is no more needed , and Google data center have replaced it.

Sandisk Updates SSD Line With SATA III Models

The U100 SSDs are targeted at ultra-thin laptops and come in capacities from 8GB to 256GB. Data can be read from the U100 at up to 450MB per second and written to the drive at up to 340MB per second. Both speeds are just over double the performance of the P4 drives that SanDisk announced at Computex last year.

IBM's PERCS Blue Water for Financial Services

For at least one Wall Street firm.
Robert Brinkman infrastructure architect for banking and financial markets at IBM, said PERCS is “an extremely interesting box.” It’s about the size of two racks and is water cooled.

Intel's ARM-out plans: Thin and light “Ultrabooks” will be 40 percent of laptops by 2012

Intel executive Sean Maloney is touting a new class of mobile consumer computers called Ultrabooks in a speech in Taiwan today. The company says that 40 percent of consumer laptops will be based on Ultrabook designs by the end of 2012.

BAD HARDWARE WEEK: There is exactly where new Windows 8 fit. Maloney said Intel is benefiting from the mobile era in other ways. He noted that for every 600 smartphones sold, one Intel server is required. And for every 122 tablets sold, one new Intel server is required. These machines, powered by the 22nm Ivy Bridge, will be less than 0.8-inches thick and start at under $1,000 -- which sounds just like the lines we were fed about CULV chips back in 2009. But prices should decline to between $699 and $799 in 2012.

Friday, May 27, 2011

NASA study of moon soil reveals plentiful water

BAD HARDWARE WEEK:
Am I crazy? Apollo mission officially found no water on Moon?

When the last Apollo astronauts walked on the moon 40 years ago, they carried home a curious collection of lunar pebbles, rocks and soil.
Now those volcanic samples of the ancient lunar crust reveal that the arid moon's interior holds far more water than scientists had believed. ?? But we have wi(l)dely accepted theory of Moon orgin, based on those "findings". !!

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Storage at Exascale: Some Thoughts from Panasas CTO Garth Gibson

HPCwire: Will there be a new parallel file system for exascale?
Gibson: The probability of starting from scratch today and building a brand new production file system deployable in time for 2018 is just about zero. There is a huge investment in software technology required to get to exascale and we cannot get there without significant further investment in the parallel file systems available today. So if we want to hit the timeline for exascale, it is going to have to take investment in new ideas and existing implementations to hit the exascale target.

Hasselblad's 200-megapixel camera: $45,000

200 Mp camera finally  approaches resolution limits of an ordinary film camera.
The multihsot modes offset each 50Mp frame by a half or a full pixel width, an approach that compensates for the fact that each sensor pixel captures only red, green, or blue light. The four-shot mode takes about 20 seconds for a full photo; the six-shot mode takes about 30 seconds. Yes, you need a tripod.

BAD HARDWARE WEEK: For DSLR pro camera with effective 18 Mpixels multishot mode could give soon 100 Mpixel camera.

DDR4 in 2014

DDR4, currently slated for release in 2014, is expected to have a voltage between 1.05 – 1.2V, depending on how far the technology advances before the standard is released.

Cray XK6 supercomputer, up to 50 Petaflops

Gemini interconnect + AMD + NVIDIA
"However, we are not looking for another GPU based stunt to place high on any Top500 lists. The Cray XK6 promises to be the first general-purpose supercomputer based on GPU technology, and we are very much looking forward to exploring its performance and productivity on real applications relevant to our scientists."

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Google executive says social networking was vital in Egyptian revolt

Facebook and Twitter are likely to be key players in future protests


World record: 26 Tbits through a single optical fiber !

Using 75 channels , each at 346Gbps

BAD HARDWARE WEEK: That is pretty close to the theoretical limit of 50/100 Tbps for an optical thread.

How to effectively clear the cache in Firefox?

Here it is.

BAD HARDWARE WEEK: VErsion 5.0 is used. Test results later.

Apple computer demand much higher than PC average

Intel Desperate to Keep ARM Off of MacBooks

BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Quite understandable. Future is in Apple books.

Monday, May 23, 2011

DWave: First commercial quantum computer

Well, pseudo quantum computer.
The chip computes answers to problems by attempting to minimize its energy. The lower the energy of the chip, the better the answer you get out.
Useful for Markov random field based problems

Apple iPhone 5 scheduled to retail on 13 September?

With the upcoming WWDC 2011 happening early next month, there have been more speculations and rumors about the iPhone 5. It was said that the highly-anticipated phone could be announced in August, and go on retail on 13 September.

Software AG to aquire Terracota

Software AG’s revenues are above €1.1 billion per year. The company has over 3,000 services engineers worldwide, offices in 70 countries, and generally more resources for customers than Terracotta could provide in the near future at its current scale.

Market Capitalization Order: Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Google


IBM ahead of Microsoft market cap

BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Seems like end of PC era.

Friday, May 20, 2011

New trends in Cyberspace by numbers

The number of personal computers in use around the world has surpassed 1 billion, with strong growth in emerging markets set to double the number of PCs by early 2014. Based on MS Windows of course.

Fukushima nuke facility under tsunami waves !

Government officials didn't want the world know for this terrifying tsunami photo.
Fukushima TEPCO President resigns.
Japanese scientist: Fukushima meltdown occurred within hours of quake

BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Nuclear fuel at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi power plant began melting just five hours after Japan’s March 11 earthquake, a Japanese nuclear engineer told a panel of U.S. scientists Thursday.
John E. Kelly, deputy assistant secretary for nuclear reactor technologies, said that protective components at the facility could crack because of high salt levels. There “is still a concern about more massive failure” of steel in the “lower head,” an important part of the containment system, Kelly told an NRC advisory committee. About 100 to 200 tons of salt left by the emergency pumping of salt water to cool the reactors are probably corroding the containment components.


Kelly also stressed that Tepco would have to continue pumping water into the damaged reactor units and venting radioactive steam for a year or more. 

Apple refuses to ever track users' locations ?

"Apple does not track users' locations -- Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so," Novelli said.

BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Security researchers have discovered that Apple's iOS 4 mobile operating system, found on both the iPhone and iPad, keeps a log of user's locations and saves the data to a hidden file on the device.
On the other side not unrelated , Congress Makes Deal To Renew Patriot Act For 4 Years

However, EU not intersted in Patriotic gateways.
Apple, Google and employers must comply with new European Union rules for geo-location data permissions

Kill all your hardware

Using bad ideas here.

NVIDIA Emulator

Nvidia Offers Peek Into Advanced Design Evaluation

Mobiles With 2.5GHz ARM Cortex A15 Will Air Late 2012, Early 2013

ARM tries to dethrone X86 architecture with its latest 16 core mprocessor in less than a year. Intel is desperate.
Microsoft on the other side calls Intel's Windows 8 claims 'factually inaccurate' and 'misleading'

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Capacitor choice is key to solar photovoltaic (PV) array economics

This article describes a common, critical problem in solar photovoltaic array inverters, and a proprietary topology which the author asserts can overcome it.

BAD HARDWARE: Here is Capacitor that had an energy density that could rival batteries, an energy-release and quick-recharge rate that exceeded batteries, and a lifetime of at least 10,000 charge/discharge cycles.

Viral photo: Endeavour goes to space last time !


Google Fixes Android Glitch That Affected '99 Percent' of Devices

Google said Wednesday that it has fixed a security glitch that reportedly opened up 99 percent of Android-based devices to a security breach.

Intel Exec: Microsoft's Windows 8 on ARM Will Lack Legacy Apps !

Microsoft's Windows 8 on ARM-based devices will lack support for legacy apps, according to an Intel executive. But that's coming from ARM's chief rival.
Windows8  for Intel chips will run programs designed for previous versions of the operating system, while the ARM-based versions will not. Intel will apparently offer its own Windows-supporting architecture for mobile devices such as tablets. Rumors suggest that Microsoft will release Windows 8—as it’s been termed, at least for brevity’s sake, by the media and analysts—sometime in 2012. 

HP, IBM, Intel and Red Hat promote an open virtualisation standard

BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat and Suse all banded together to create the Open Virtualisation Alliance, which aims to facilitate interoperability between various vendors virtualisation software. One of the key areas where the firms want to agree upon a standard is for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM).

ARM upbeat on pricing, Intel threat

"Intel's announcement of 3D structures at 20 nanometer was an interesting announcement but from our point of view nothing really more than that," Chief Executive Warren East told Reuters Technology Summit on Tuesday.

BAD HARDWARE WEEK doesn't lye. What is the truth? Well, Intel's FIN transistor is only a useful remedy in an ordinary leakage problem at 20nm and below. Sort of sign Intel cope with leakage problems. However, ARM's low power consumption goal is envisioned from the scratch.

The latest on the upcoming 32nm AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) code-named “Llano”

The latest on the upcoming 32nm AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) code-named “Llano”.

BAD HARDWARE WEEK: AMD's first 32nm chip ?

Abu Dhabi Globalfoundries fab to break ground in 2012

Chip foundry Globalfoundries Inc. plans to invest $6 to $8 billion on a semiconductor fab in Abu Dhabi that will break ground in 2012 and begin producing chips in 2015, according to a report by the Bloomberg news service.
Globalfoundries plans to invest $6 billion to $8 billion in a semiconductor plant in Abu Dhabi,

Future of the USA: 8 of China's Top 9 Govt. Officials Are Engineers

President Hu Jintao was trained as a hydraulic engineer. Likewise his Premier, Wen Jiabao, is a geomechanical engineer.  Let me remind you: USSR's Brezhnev was engineer too. During his reign USSR have leaded in space research.

BAD HARDWARE WEEK: Will a new cold war follow? This time with China? 535 members of the U.S. Congress, only 22 have science or engineering backgrounds, and of these only two might be considered experienced scientists or engineers.
What more, USA dollar as a world leading currency will fade in the next 15 years.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Windows 7 Big Brother Awareness: How latest Windows knows it has an internet connection ?

It is possible to disable NCSI by a registry setting if you don’t want Microsoft to be able to check your internet connection. The same is valid not only for Win7 but for Vista users too.

Monday, May 16, 2011

HP to produce memristors commercially !

HP has built sample devices in its labs that should enable storage densities of 12G bytes per square centimeter, Williams said . That's using a 15-nanometer production process and a multi-level design, where four layers of memory cell are stacked on top of one another.

Fukushima meltdown

It is confirmed as BAD HARDWARE found first that Fukushima nuke reactors suffered meltdown and the radioactive water still leaks out.
Of course Bad Russians were those who have hidden effects of  their meltodown. No, not the free democratic world.

BAD HARDWARE: The United States was not immune to the fallout of the radiation release. I mean on Chernobyl meltdown, not on Fukushima one. That data will only follow.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

The iPad 2 in Your Hand: As Fast as a Cray 2 Supercomputer

Research group has run the test on Apple’s new iPad 2, and it turns out that the legal-pad-size tablet would be a rival for a four-processor version of the Cray 2 supercomputer, which, with eight processors, was the world’s fastest computer in 1985.

BHW: Only 26 years have gone since. What about palm computing power in year 2037 ?

World's Servers Process 9.57ZB of Data a Year

Researchers at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and the San Diego Supercomputer Center estimate that the total is equivalent to a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books stretching from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times. By 2024, business servers worldwide will annually process the digital equivalent of a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri, the scientists say.

Cedartrail abandons Intel's GPU


Monday, May 09, 2011

Terabit Ethernet: IEEE looks beyond 100G Ethernet !

Companies such as Google and Facebook that run big data centers have called for Terabit Ethernet as early as 2013 to handle the growth of mobile and video data.

BAD HARDWARE WEEK: What with poor Terabit transfer efficiency? Taking in account limited speed of light? I believe that more channels will be used, and that alleviate but definitely not solves the limited speed of light problem connected with transfer efficiency.

Friday, May 06, 2011

The firm offers moon orbit tourist trips, $150M per seat !

The company quoted Vice Chairman Richard Garriott as saying it had sold one of the two seats for the flight and anticipated that the launch would occur in 2015.

BHW: US future Orion Moon spacecraft might find a bunch of tourists on Moon during the first orbit around ?
AUSTRALIAN astronaut Andy Thomas says NASA's groundbreaking space rocket test could help put tourists on the moon by 2020.
Or, is it much cheaper to pay Russians a drive?

IBM Commemorates NASA's 50th Anniversary of First U.S. Manned Space Flight and the IBMers Who Supported It

The team developed a "real-time channel" called the IBM 7281, which could receive up to 1,000 bits of data per second -- a breakthrough innovation at the time.

BHW: 1000 bps ? Pretty low for today's standards.

A Study about Exaflops machine based on Intel's Knight Corner

 
It is fairly likely that Intel is designing 64 cores onto the chip, and then — yields being what they are on massive chips — cores with boogers in them will be deactivated and customers will get what they get.
The Larrabee predecessor design used a superscalar x64 core (without the out-of-order execution of Xeons, so akin to the Atom chip in some respects) and a 512-bit vector math unit that could do 16 floating point operations per clock doing single precision math.

BAD HARDWARE: 25% of test failed cores inside chip? Pretty bad. However on the other side, all existing high performance software based on C and C++ will still work. To get functional 64 cores processor you will actually need 80 processors inside MIC (multi integrated cores) chip. Oh, how many Knight Corners for an Exaflops machine? Some 200 000 in 11 nm technology in year 2016-2017. On multichip modules, only 50 000 of them. However, further geometry scaling pace is not quite feasible as it follows from Intel's maps.
But, after hiding fin transistors in their 22nm breakthrough, it is quite possible that Intel hides something more in their sleeves.. Particularly, a cynic would say, if Intel tries to charge $10,000 for one of these Knights that would cost $2B for the Exa cores alone. Hmmm. That might awake you abruptly out the sweet Exa dreams.
Even $1000 per Knight still cost $200M for the cores. On possible power bills is thus a bit premature to speak.
Thus, 100 Pflops knightly goal seems more plausible for now. Not taking in account problems with futuristic machine's huge failure rates.

ARM to capture 13% of PC market by 2015

Close to AMD?
Intel has 86 per cent mobile PC market share

ARM based PC in every TV? Why not.

Thursday, May 05, 2011

Intel's Knights Corner 48 cores processor will use FIN transistors

Knights Corner will be Intel's first commercial version of MIC, will have upwards of 50 cores per chip, and will be implemented on the company's 22nm process technology. Although no official date has been announced for the commercial launch, according to a presentation by Intel research engineer Pradeep Dubey at the recent 2011 Open Fabrics International Workshop in Monterey, Knights Corner is slated for release sometime in the second half of 2012.

Pradeep Dubey is a senior principal engineer and manager of Innovative Platform Architecture (IPA) in the Microprocessor Technology Lab, part of the Corporate Technology Group. His research focus is computer architectures to efficiently handle new application paradigms for the future computing environment. Dubey previously worked at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, and Broadcom Corporation. He was one of the principal architects of the AltiVec* multimedia extension to Power PC* architecture. He also worked on the design, architecture, and performance issues of various microprocessors, including Intel® i386TM, i486TM, and Pentium® processors. He holds over 25 patents and has published extensively. 

Cray Cascade in EU

Cray's next-generation Cascade supercomputer will feature a continuing evolution of the Cray Linux Environment, Cray's HPC-optimized programming environment, a next-generation interconnect chipset follow-on to Gemini and support for future Intel(R) Xeon(R) processors.

Intel Announces New 22nm 3D Tri-gate Transistors

What Intel has done is adopt a 3D gate structure that creates a fin of substrate material through which the gate passes. This actually increases the size of the inversion layer (allowing for higher drive current) but minimizes the power lost to leakage. Intel says the new 3-D technology provides a 37% increase in performance.  Intel's diagrams indicate that the company is moving to SOI as well.
Today, Intel demonstrated the world's first 22nm microprocessor, codenamed "Ivy Bridge," working in a laptop, server and desktop computer. Ivy Bridge-based Intel Core family processors will be the first high-volume chips to use 3-D Tri-Gate transistors. Ivy Bridge is slated for high-volume production readiness by the end of this year.

BAD HARDWARE: Intel will lose its advantage in bulk scaling. The only way to stay competitive is to use unveiled FIN structures to diminish ever increasing transistor leaking. However, I am sure that IBM and AMD will follow soon with the same design approach. We believe Intel may be as much as two years ahead of the competition. However, not in mobile processors. "The current 2-D transistor will hit its limit when the production process advances beyond 20 nanometers and that's when we will switch to 3-D transistors," Chiang from TSMC added.

Wednesday, May 04, 2011

Big Brother is using Facebook, Google, Yahoo backdoors ?

"Facebook, Google, Yahoo, all these major US organizations have built-in interfaces for US intelligence. It's not a matter of serving a subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for US intelligence to use."

The man behind WikiLeaks says his website's revelations are just the tip of the iceberg. In an exclusive interview with RT, Julian Assange said it is only a matter of time before more damaging information becomes known.
There’s an enormous hidden world out there that we don’t know about. It exists there right now.”
We only released secret, classified, confidential material. We didn’t have any top secret cables. The really embarrassing stuff, the really serious stuff wasn’t in our collection to release. But it is still out there.”

Force10 cranks Ethernet switches to 40 Gigabits . 100 Gigabits this year

Will hit 100 Gigabits this year

NASA Technology Looks Inside Japan's Nuclear Reactor

Design techniques honed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., for Mars rovers were used to create the rover currently examining the inside of Japan's nuclear reactors, in areas not yet deemed safe for human crews.

IBM Is Prepping Power7+ and Pondering Power8


About the only thing that it is safe to guess on with Power8 is that it will use a 32 nanometer or 28 nanometer process and will come out sometime in 2013.

Rumor mill: Intel to roll 22-nm

The 22-nm process is called 1270 and it is starting to ramp. First wafers will come out of D1D in Oregon and then volume production will start at F32 in Arizona in the later half of this year.
One source even thinks Intel is looking at tri-gate structures at 22- or at 15-nm.
Chief executive Paul Otellini has said last year that 22-nm microprocessor family dubbed Ivy Bridge is on its way to be launched in the second half of 2011. 

First 1 TB hard disk platter

Seagate is on shipment target with 3TB HDD with three platters.

India: SAGA, Supercomputer for Aerospace with GPU Architecture,

220 TFlops
Here

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