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)
Flying Math: Bees Solve Traveling Salesman Problem
Posted on Sunday, September 30, 2012 at 1:57 AM by
Malcolm
Bumblebees foraging in flowers for nectar are like salesmen traveling between towns: Both seek the optimal route to minimize their travel costs. Mathematicians call this the “traveling salesman problem,” in which scientists try to calculate the shortest possible route given a theoretical arrangement of cities. Bumblebees, however, take the brute-force approach: For them, it’s simply a matter of experience, plus trial and error, as reported in this Wired article.
Unit Testing: Is There Really Any Debate Any Longer?
Posted on Wednesday, September 12, 2012 at 2:00 AM by
Malcolm
On a panel several years ago, Dr. Dobbs's editor-in-chief Andrew Binstock was asked what was the greatest benefit that Agile had delivered to him personally. It took him no time to respond “unit testing.”
While this answer is not historically accurate — unit testing precedes the Agile movement — it’s clear that the Agile exponents made it a widespread practice. In large part, because of Kent Beck’s lapidary JUnit implementation, which has been widely copied to most major languages.
The specific benefit Andrew — and many other developers — have enjoyed is quite simply less time spent in the debugger. Today he writes code and then he writes unit tests that exercise the edge cases and one or two main cases. Right away, Andrew can tell if he missed something obvious or if his implementation has a slight burble that mishandles cases he expected to flow through easily.
Read the rest of this artcile here.
Improving Futures and Callbacks in C++ To Avoid Synching by Waiting
Posted on Saturday, July 28, 2012 at 9:35 AM by
Malcolm
The C++11 standard provides several long-requested concurrency features such as the std::thread, std::future, and others. While those are a welcome addition to the language, in this article, the author showed that they are not sufficient for all but the most basic concurrency needs. He further argued that the primitives in C++11 are particularly ill-suited for modern applications that must deal with the concurrency imposed by I/O operations and exploit multicore at the same time. Microsoft's Parallel Pattern Library (PPL) provides a solution using tasks. Read the rest of the article here.
Dead Sea Scroll Online by Google
Posted on Saturday, October 01, 2011 at 7:10 PM by
Malcolm
Edited on: Saturday, October 01, 2011 7:18 PM
Posted in General (RSS) , Science (RSS)
Google Dynamic View
Posted on Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 10:12 PM by
Malcolm
Google has launched a completely rebuilt, streamlined authoring and editing experience with seven new ways to display blogs in Blogger called Dynamic Views.
Built with the latest in web technology (AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3), Dynamic Views is a unique browsing experience that will inspire readers to explore blog in new ways. The interactive layouts make it easier for readers to enjoy and discover posts, loading 40 percent faster than traditional templates and bringing older entries to the surface so they seem fresh again.
Edited on: Wednesday, September 28, 2011 9:19 AM
Posted in (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)
Parallel Microsoft-Style
Posted on Monday, August 22, 2011 at 10:25 PM by
Malcolm
"Actors avoid the dangers of the shared-memory model because they touch only the data that's sent to them in messages. If they need some external data, they request it from other actors (by sending the request in the form of a message). In addition, the data actors receive is immutable. They don't change the data, rather they copy it and transform the copy. In this way, no two threads are ever contending for access to the same data item, nor are their internal operations interfering with one another. As a result, the nightmares I described earlier disappear almost completely."
This article from Dr. Dobb Journal discussed how the actor model of concurrency is gaining favor in Java but remains largely ignored by Microsoft.
Edited on: Tuesday, August 23, 2011 10:31 AMGoogle Instant Pages
Posted on Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 10:55 PM by
Malcolm
Google Instant Pages is now on by default in the latest stable version of Chrome. This means that sometimes when you click a Google search result in Chrome, the page will appear to load much faster than before. The video above shows a side by side comparison of Chrome with and without Instant Pages enabled.
Posted in (RSS)
Smart Sheet
Posted on Friday, August 19, 2011 at 11:23 PM by
Malcolm
Smartsheet is used by thousands of companies for online project management, task management, and many other types of work. Edited on: Thursday, September 08, 2011 10:52 AM
Posted in (RSS)
New Position
Posted on Friday, July 29, 2011 at 11:43 PM by
Malcolm
I have left NTU in June 2011 and is now with D-SIMLAB Technologies.
Edited on: Tuesday, August 23, 2011 10:31 AMPosted in (RSS)
Google Chrome Notebook
Posted on Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 10:19 AM by
Malcolm
The puzzle embedded in the video has been solved. See: Jamendo geeks solve the hidden Chrome OS equation (and win a Cr-48 netbook);
Google Chrome Blog: X = G / (C*H*R*O*M - 3);
Edited on: Wednesday, August 10, 2011 2:15 PMPosted in (RSS)
Forget Brainstorming
Posted on Tuesday, August 03, 2010 at 5:51 PM by
Malcolm
According to this article from newsweek, brainstorming has been proven not to work since 1958, when Yale researchers found that the technique actually reduced a team’s creative output: the same number of people generate more and better ideas separately than together.
The State and Future of JavaScript
Posted on Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 10:07 AM by
Malcolm
Posted in General (RSS) , Tech (RSS)
Happy New Year 2010
Posted on Friday, January 01, 2010 at 12:03 PM by
Malcolm
What Should We Teach New Software Developers? Why? - CACM article by Bjarne Stroustrup
Posted on Tuesday, December 22, 2009 at 11:58 PM by
Malcolm
Posted in General (RSS) , Teaching (RSS)
Software Engineering Method and Theory: Call for Action Statement
Posted on Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 8:12 AM by
Malcolm
- The prevalence of fads more typical of fashion industry than of an engineering discipline.
- The lack of a sound, widely accepted theoretical basis.
- The huge number of methods and method variants, with differences little understood and artificially magnified.
- The lack of credible experimental evaluation and validation.
- The split between industry practice and academic research.
- Includes a kernel of widely-agreed elements, extensible for specific uses.
- Addresses both technology and people issues.
- Is supported by industry, academia, researchers and users.
- Supports extension in the face of changing requirements and technology.
You can become a supporter of the community by signing up at the site: www.semat.org.
Edited on: Wednesday, December 16, 2009 9:01 AM
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)
Compilers and More: OpenCL Promises and Potential
Posted on Saturday, September 12, 2009 at 12:49 PM by
Malcolm
Ebook: HPC for Dummies
Posted on Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 12:37 AM by
Malcolm
