Monday, June 17, 2013
The ten fastest supercomputers on the planet
Ars Technica - A Chinese supercomputer known as Tianhe-2 was today named the world's fastest machine, nearly doubling the previous speed record with its performance of 33.86 petaflops.
Tianhe-2's ascendance was revealed in advance and was made official today with the release of the new Top 500 supercomputer list.
Tianhe-2 was developed at China's National University of Defense Technology and will be deployed in the country's National Supercomputing Center before the end of this year. "The surprise appearance of Tianhe-2, two years ahead of the expected deployment, marks China’s first return to the No. 1 position since November 2010, when Tianhe-1A was the top system," the Top 500 announcement states. "Tianhe-2 has 16,000 nodes, each with two Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors for a combined total of 3,120,000 computing cores."
The combined performance of the 500 systems on the list is 223 petaflops, up from 162 petaflops in the previous list released six months ago. A petaflop represents one quadrillion floating point operations per second, or a million billion.
26 systems hit at least a petaflop. IBM's Blue Gene/Q accounted for four of the top 10, while Intel provided the processors for 80.4 percent of all Top 500 systems. 39 systems use Nvidia GPUs to speed up calculations, and another 15 use other accelerator or co-processor technology such as AMD's ATI Radeon and Intel's Xeon Phi.
252 of the 500 are installed in the US, 112 are in Europe, 66 are in China, and 30 are in Japan. The slowest computer on the list hit 96.6 teraflops, compared to 76.5 teraflops for the slowest computer on last November's list.
Besides Tianhe-2, the only new entrant in the top ten is a Blue Gene/Q system named Vulcan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
View the Slideshow!
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Waterproof Samsung Galaxy S4 Active makes some waves
CNET - Samsung's Galaxy S4 line gets another family member in the Samsung Galaxy S4 Active, a hardened, ruggedized spin off of the company's flagship model.
Waterproof to a meter below the surface and for up to 30 minutes, the Active carries on computing with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, Samsung's TouchWiz interface, and a 1.9GHz quad-core processor, the same as its more delicate Galaxy S4 sibling. More
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
E3 2013: Day One Wrap Up
A handy guide to everything you need to know from E3
IGN - Day one of E3 2013 has finished, and quite a few announcements were made. Here's all the biggest announcements in one handy location.
Microsoft
View the Rest of the Coverage!
Apple's iOS 7 is almost unrecognizable - Hands on With the New Mobile OS
CNET - SAN FRANCISCO -- To silence a growing chorus of discontent against an operating system design that's remained more or less static since 2007, Apple needed to go big. With iOS 7, it did. Apple's crisp, newly announced OS update gives the mobile operating system a radical new look and some first-for-Apple features for iPhone and iPad fans, like quick-access system controls, automatic app updates, and Apple's AirDrop file-sharing system.
The visual overhaul, which becomes available this fall, is a clean sweep that changes absolutely everything, from the typography and color schemes to the typical icon and button shape across the entire platform. And we mean the whole thing -- from the Safari browser to the photo app.
While there are a few notable new features in iOS 7, the new interface is by far the platform's deepest felt and most profoundly changed of the entire batch. Apple's other features are relatively uninspiring and do little to challenge competitors; however, we have a feeling that Apple is saving some major reveals for its next big iPhone announcement.
The fresh new look of Apple iOS 7 (pictures)
Design
Gone are the skeuomorphic interface elements that make icons and apps look like leather or paper or felt. Gone, too, are the slightly bubbly icon effects. Flat graphics and a dappled, pastel color scheme bring an elegant look. When you move the phone or tablet, Apple promises a 3D effect that makes your wallpaper appear some distance behind the icons.
Circles enter the design language, along with visuals that look nearly transparent, like a pane of glass. See what we mean in the slideshow above. The most important part of any deep design work is that it feels smooth and connected from screen to screen. We had a chance to sit down with some of the folks from Apple after the keynote and check out iOS 7 for ourselves. More
Monday, June 10, 2013
E3 2013: all the latest news from this year's hottest gaming show
We're pretty jazzed...you?
Here's all the latest from the conference:
EA wheels out 11 next-gen titles
Waiting anxiously for news on Star Wars: Battlefront and Mirror's Edge 2? EA heard your calls and talked up both titles, along with nine others, during its pre-E3 press conference.All the games are destined for the PS4 and Xbox One, and while we won't see either console for awhile, EA generated some buzz by enlisting some celebs to talk up the titles. It was interesting, to say the least.
The Xbox One is $499, £429 and coming this November
We saw game after game at the Microsoft E3 press conference, but at the end, it made good with the numbers. It seems that the Xbox One will be arriving just in time for the holidays.It's not surprising that Microsoft's new console should arrive in time to be tucked under Christmas. It could be quite a retail battle if the PS4 arrives in the same month. Sony had previously announced a "holiday 2013" release date. More
Also see Microsoft at E3 2013
What Apple revealed at WWDC 2013
CNET - At its Worldwide Developers Conference today, Apple gave the world a glimpse of the next products in its pipeline, with the next version of its Mac operating system leading the way. After years of giving OS X cat-related names (Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, and so on), the company has moved on, choosing California-themed titles for future versions of the operating system. And the first in that new line is OS X 10.9, which will be known as Mavericks.
Named after the world-famous surfing competition held near Half Moon Bay, Calif., Mavericks will be available today in a preview for developers, and for everyone else this fall. The new operating system will feature improved battery life, many new applications, better power management, tabs in Finder, and the ability to add tags to file names so they're more searchable.
As well, Apple has built the ability to use multiple displays into Mavericks, giving power users (such as the developers who have filled WWDC to capacity) more screen real estate, and more multitasking capabilities.
The next new product is an updated Safari, Apple's browser. The latest Safari will feature a new home screen with top sites, and what's known as a Reading list, a tool that lets users keep scrolling from the end of articles to the next stories on a site. And on the performance side, the next Safari has Nitro tiered JIT, Nitro fast start, background tab optimization, and better memory usage.
Maps
Given Apple's lost relationship with Google, the company has been forced to develop -- with very mixed results -- its own mapping tools. And now it is bringing Maps to OS X. The newest version of the tool features 3D maps, and the ability to get an instant estimated time of arrival for any address in a calendar event. More
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