This NPR podcast examines the top science stories of 2010. From the Gulf oil spill and the earthquake in Haiti to the creation of synthetic life and the Icelandic volcano, many science stories made headlines in 2010. Science writers Ron Cowen, Robin Lloyd, Andrew Revkin and Paul Raeburn join Ira Flatow to discuss the year’s […]
Archives for 2010
China Unveils Design of New Supercomputer Center in Changsha
December 31, 2010 by
Get ready for liftoff. China has unveiled a sleek, ultra modern-appearing design for National Supercomputing Center in Changsha. Once completed sometime in 2011, the center will be the new home of the Tianhe-1A, the fastest system in the world as ranked by the TOP500.
Why the Feds Fund Research
December 31, 2010 by
Microsoft’s Elizabeth L. Grossman reflects on passage of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act by the U.S. Congress: One area highlighted in the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act for additional research is cloud computing. The broad potential of this field is demonstrated by the current partnership between Microsoft and the National Science Foundation, through which Microsoft will provide […]
Intel Unveils Tiny SSDs
December 30, 2010 by
By Rik Myslewski in San Francisco • Get more from this author Intel announced on Wednesday a new line of tiny solid-state drives, the SSD 310 series, that have performance specs comparable to those of their 2.5-inch X-25 and 1.8-inch X-18 SSD brethren – and at least one manufacturer is already on board to put […]
Video: Making High-Quality CFD Movies with Caedium
December 30, 2010 by
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8JJ9HgQfcQ I have always found CFD simulations fascinating, but they often seem to have a cartoony level of quality. Now Symscape has announced that their Caedium software can now create high-quality movies: Caedium (v2.4) can now create high-quality movies, where each frame can be rendered by either POV-Ray or a Renderman-compliant renderer, such as Aqsis. Further, […]
Download: Introduction to High Performance Scientific Computing
December 30, 2010 by
A new HPC textbook by Victor Eijkhout, Introduction to High Performance Scientific Computing, is now available as a free download. The need for a book such as the present was especially apparent at the Texas Advanced Computing Center: users of the facilities there often turn out to miss crucial parts of the background that would […]
Call for Presentations: AMD Fusion Developer Summit
December 29, 2010 by
AMD has issued a Call for Presentation Proposals for its first annual Fusion Developer Summit – inviting leaders in next-generation software to share their work and research findings with their peers. The Summit is timed to follow the upcoming launch of the first AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Units (APU), which are expected to bring to the […]
Can the Earth Project Simulate Everything?
December 29, 2010 by
I remember reading this paper some years back that proposed that we are all living in a computer simulation. It’s a fun idea to think about, especially as I sit here listening to the Tron Legacy soundtrack. Now, in what could be one of the most ambitious computer projects ever conceived, an international group of scientists […]
The Case for a Better HPC Benchmark
December 29, 2010 by
Mark Anderson at IEEE Spectrum writes that it’s time for high-performance computers to be rated not just in petaflops (quadrillions of floating-point operations per second) but also in “gigateps” (billions of traversed edges per second). What we’re most interested in is being able to traverse the whole memory of the machine,” says Richard Murphy, a […]
Nvidia Adds 20 New CUDA Research and Training Centers
December 28, 2010 by
Nvidia has announced the addition of 20 new CUDA Research and Training Centers that will be focused on leveraging GPUs to address today’s most challenging computing issues. There are more than 350 universities worldwide teaching the CUDA programming language, and more than 100,000 programmers actively developing applications on CUDA GPUs,” said Bill Dally, chief scientist […]
