Call for Participation: OutsideHPC

To all of our readers out there, we’re still looking for submissions for next week’s issue of OutsideHPC.  Last week, we featured the work of undergraduate ACM students at Fordham University.

What is OutsideHPC? OutsideHPC is our attempt to feature users and organizations utilizing high performance/technical computing to solve problems outside the norm.  …

Vintage Supercomputer Headed to US

The Difference Engine number 2, designed by Charles Babbage, is on its way to the United States.  Babbage began building the calculator in 1821 but abandoned the effort in 1832.  The Science Museum of London completed the job in 2002.  An identical version of the design was commissioned and built for Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, for display in …

Google Gives Free Voicemail to San Francisco Homeless

From coverage at the DailyTech

Google says the voicemail will allow doctors and employers to contact the homeless

Awesome.

PSA: Resolution for Wii suddenly not playing newer games

This is totally off topic, but I’ve found a solution to a Wii error that I could not find anywhere on the interwebs, and I want to document it here for Google to find.

The situation: Wii, purchased in May 2007, working fine. Got some new games at Christmas (Ben 10, Guitar Hero III, Links crossbow training, and some others) that …

Intel Marks 60th Anniversary of the Transistor

Intel has setup a series of interesting briefs on the history of the transistor and more specifically, transistor density in order to mark the 60th anniversary of the revolutionary device.

Intel Corporation on Dec. 16 celebrates the 60th anniversary of the transistor, the building block of today’s digital world. Invented by Bell Labs and

The Storm Has Passed

What once was arguably called a 4 Petaflop Supercomputer has now been reduced to a small squal.

Today, Enright said that Storm is about one-tenth of its former size. His most recent data counts 20,000 infected PCs available at any one time, out of a total network of about 160,000 computers. “The size of the network has been

2007 Nobel Prize for discovery that led to today’s disk drives

Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, writes on his blog that the 2007 prize in physics has been awarded to the chaps that discovered giant magnetoresistance. Oh yes, you do too care.

The 2007 Nobel prize in Physics has been awarded to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg for independently discovering Giant Magnetoresistance in 1988. Their work had a tremendous impact on the computer

SC07 Conference Public Events Calendar

…and now for something completely different…

As the clock slowly ticks down the hours to this year’s installment of the IEEE/ACM Supercomputing conference, I began gathering up my various emails and paper scribbles in order to prepare a true calendar of events for myself. After several years of being invited to vendor/community meetings, breakfasts, dinners, …

Solid State SAN!?

SanDisk, manufacturer of your favorite USB sticks, has announced that it will sell its solid-state 32GB SATA disks through select distribution parnters.  These disks were previously only available to PC manufacturers as a replacement for their standard, 2.5″ SATA laptop drives. [Read the full article here]

Now, I understand this has very little direct correlation with …

Microsoft unveils Surface today

According to SeekingAlpha today:

Microsoft Corp. will unveil a coffee table shaped touch-screen computer at a technology conference Wednesday. Called Microsoft Surface (pictured), the computer will forgo the usual convention of keyboards and mouse devices in exchange for Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ vision of more natural human-computer interactions using touch and voice.

Forbes.com …