Archive for the Tech category
Chinese Computer is the world's fastest - and without using US chips
Posted on Saturday, September 10, 2016 at 11:17 AM by Malcolm
A Chinese supercomputer built using domestic chip technology has been declared the world's fastest. The news highlights China's recent advances in the creation of such systems, as well the country's waning reliance on US semiconductor technology. Read the rest of the article here.
Edited on: Saturday, September 10, 2016 12:01 PMPosted in HPC (RSS), Research (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Microsoft opens Windows 8 preview to all
Posted on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 10:07 PM by Malcolm
Microsoft has made a preview of Windows 8 available to anyone who takes the time to download it.
Windows 8 Developer Preview, as Microsoft called the pre-beta build, was posted to a company website shortly after 8 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday.
The downloads, which range from 2.8GB to 4.8GB in size, come with no restrictions, a company spokeswoman confirmed earlier in the day.
The links to download Win8 torrents are here:
Windows 8 Developer Preview 64-bit + Developer tools
Windows 8 Developer Preview 64 bit
For the torrent for 32bit version, check out this whopping 11.3GB of download. Use selective downloading (unselect the 64bit ISOs in the file list of your torrent client).
The direct download links:
Download Windows 8 Developer Preview (64-bit) with Developer Tools
Download Windows 8 Developer Preview (64-bit) without the developer tools
Download Windows 8 Developer Preview (32-bit)
Edited on: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 9:21 AMPosted in General (RSS), Tech (RSS)
The State and Future of JavaScript
Posted on Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 10:07 AM by Malcolm
Douglas Crockford talks on the history of JavaScript unveiling some of the struggles the Ecma Technical Committee has had in advancing the language over the years, concluding with lessons learned: if one has a great idea he should not tell it to a standardization body but rather do it, a change to a widely used standard is an act of violence, standards are hard, and one cannot please everyonePosted in General (RSS), Tech (RSS)
A System-based Approach to Spares Management
Posted on Thursday, October 01, 2009 at 4:06 PM by Malcolm
The traditional approach to inventory provisioning sets all spares requirements to a level that meets an item’s performance measure, such as a stock-out protection level, a fill rate, a mission critical rate, or a confidence level. Such an approach cannot explicitly consider the overall performance of the system, nor can it be constrained to a set total cost for the spares mix.
However, a spares' benefit should be measured in terms of the projected increase in system availability by adding that spare to the inventory. The system-based inventory provisioning approach is significantly different from the traditional item approach for generating spares requirements, which treats all items the same. In system-based inventory provisioning, spares can then be ranked in terms of benefit, then divided by cost as a measure of the desirability of adding them to the inventory. The problem then is to answer the question "What mix of spare parts is required to keep the system at some level of operational performance for a specific scenario?". An optimal solution in this case means a solution in which no other mix of spares can provide a greater system availability for the same cost, or the same system availability for less cost (within the scope of the model assumptions and data). Thus, there exists not just one solution, but a set of solutions that represent different trade-off between system availability and cost.
An example of system-based inventory provisioning is the work on the Aircraft Sustainability Model from the Logistics Management Institute which is a mathematical statistical model used by the United States Air Force to computes optimal spares mixed to support a wide range of possible scenarios. Another example is the D-SIMSPAIR product from D-SIMLAB Technologies which uses simulation-based optimization to compute optimal mix of aerospace rotables for maintenance contracts.
Related Links:
- A systems approach to spares management
- The Aircraft Sustainability Model
- Aircraft Sustainability Model®
- D-SIMLAB Technologies
Posted in General (RSS), Research (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Multi-agent, Parallel Processing, Robotic, Warehousing
Posted on Saturday, November 01, 2008 at 7:50 PM by Malcolm
This article from the July issue of IEEE Spectrum describes a state-of-the-art agent-based robotic warehousing system. Unlike traditional warehouse where operators go around the warehouse picking orders, in this system, swarms of robots controlled by an agent-based scheduling, dispatching and traffic control system, worked in parallel to bring shelves to the operators for picking. The system has already been deployed by Staples, Walgreens and Zappos.
Posted in General (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Programming Languages - 6 Scripting Languages Your Developers Wish You'd Let Them Use
Posted on Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 12:59 PM by Malcolm
Links to Programming Languages
6 Scripting Languages Your Developers Wish You'd Let Them Use
Edited on: Friday, September 09, 2016 1:04 PMPosted in General (RSS), Research (RSS), Tech (RSS)
10 Great Tech Books
Posted on Sunday, October 19, 2008 at 6:59 PM by Malcolm
From the July issue of IEEE Spectrum, below are 10 great general-interest books about technology.- The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroski
- Mirror Worlds; or, The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How it Will Happen and What it Will Mean by David Gelernter
- A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
- The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
- The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
- The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing by David Kahn
- Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham
- Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
Posted in General (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Professor Who Wrote 200,000+ Books
Posted on Saturday, October 18, 2008 at 12:17 PM by Malcolm
This interesting article describes how a management science professor make use of publicly available data on internet and computer AI to automatically "generate" 200,000 books and publishes and sells them for profit.Edited on: Saturday, October 18, 2008 12:18 PM
Posted in General (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Lifelike Animation
Posted on Saturday, September 06, 2008 at 12:53 PM by Malcolm
From the story: "The woman above is not real. I mean, she was real once, when real actress Emily O'Brien provided Image Metrics (you know their work from GTAIV) with 35 facial poses in front of a pair of digital cameras. From there, O'Brien was dismissed so the animators could go to work. Apparently "ninety per cent of the work is convincing people that the eyes are real." And the results, while not always perfect, are pretty extraordinary."
Edited on: Saturday, September 06, 2008 4:48 PM
Posted in General (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Sun's Fortress Language: Parallelism by Default
Posted on Friday, July 18, 2008 at 1:47 PM by Malcolm
If anyone knows how to introduce a new programming language, it's Sun Microsystems. The company's highly successful Java language, which was introduced in 1991, has become ubiquitous in network-centric and embedded computing. Today, there's a whole research team at Sun Labs devoted to programming languages, and the big project there in recent years has been the development of the Fortress programming language. The end game is to "do for Fortran what Java did for C."Posted in HPC (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Graphics chips help supercomputers become commonplace
Posted on Tuesday, July 08, 2008 at 1:36 PM by Malcolm
The sight of supercomputers in every home and office may soon become a reality thanks to video games such as Grand Theft Auto. High-end 3D games need the fastest graphics chips to run well. This has driven graphics cards makers to build ever-faster cards, and performance from the graphics processor on these cards is hundreds of times faster than the processor in a standard PC.Posted in HPC (RSS), Tech (RSS)
A massively parallel future
Posted on Tuesday, July 08, 2008 at 1:30 PM by Malcolm
AMD has fired the first shots around a massively parallel computing architecture in the form of the ATi Radeon HD 4800 series GPGPU featuring a mind-blowing 800 cores (or shader units). A GPGPU, or General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit, blurs the distinction between CPU and GPU and promises to usher in an entirely new paradigm for programmers to learn. The future has arrived in a chip that delivers more than one teraflop of computing power, and, best of all, it has arrived in the form of a $200 (6,700 baht) mid-range graphics card.Posted in HPC (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Serial computing is dead; the future is parallelism
Posted on Tuesday, July 01, 2008 at 12:44 AM by Malcolm
Serial computing is dead, and the parallel computing revolution has begun: Are you part of the solution, or part of the problem? That was the question posed by Dave Patterson, head of the Parallel Computing Laboratory at UC Berkeley, during his keynote address at the Usenix conference in Boston on June 26.Posted in HPC (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Google urged to make a more loving cloud
Posted on Thursday, June 26, 2008 at 7:12 PM by Malcolm
Yes, Google has opened its cloud to every developer down on earth. But for some, it's not quite as open as it should be.
Posted in HPC (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Intel says 'no' to Windows Vista
Posted on Thursday, June 26, 2008 at 7:01 PM by Malcolm
Windows Vista is not for Intel, it has been claimed. The chip giant will not be installing the new operating systems on its many thousands of desktop PCs. It has "no compelling case" to do so.
Posted in General (RSS), Tech (RSS)
An Evolutionary Path for High Performance Heterogeneous Multicore Programming
Posted on Friday, June 13, 2008 at 6:01 PM by Malcolm
The multicore era has opened the Pandora box of parallel programming environments. Closing it won't be easy. To address both portability and performance on heterogeneous multicore platforms, a directives-based approach may be the way to go.Posted in HPC (RSS), Tech (RSS)
Heterogeneous machines with x86 and GPU processors make more sense than many-cored chips
Posted on Wednesday, June 11, 2008 at 10:08 AM by Malcolm
Chuck Moore from AMD argued that these heterogeneous machines with x86 and GPU processors will make more sense moving forward than the so-called many-cored chips that the likes of Sun and Intel are pursuing where software is spread across tens or even hundreds of similar cores.Edited on: Friday, July 18, 2008 1:58 PM
Posted in HPC (RSS), Tech (RSS)
How a pair of American spies created the Soviet Silicon Valley - Part II
Posted on Sunday, May 11, 2008 at 3:50 PM by Malcolm
Episode 16 of Semi-Coherent Computing comtinues with the second part of the tale of two Americans who became spies for the Soviets and then helped created the Soviet version of Silicon Valley.The podcast for the two parts are available here: Part I, Part II.
May 1, 1964: First Basic Program Runs
Posted on Friday, May 02, 2008 at 1:27 AM by Malcolm
From the article: 1964: In the predawn hours of May Day, two professors at Dartmouth College run the first program in their new language, Basic.How a pair of American spies created the Soviet Silicon Valley
Posted on Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 5:31 PM by Malcolm
Few stories in computing history come close to matching the tale of Zelenograd - the Soviet Union's attempt at creating something along the lines of Silicon Valley. Episode 15 of Semi-Coherent Computing recounts the tale of Zelenograd's founding along with the stories of the two US-born Russian spies behind the city.
