Tag Archives: Computing

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Los Alamos Lab’s Roadrunner Supercomputer To Be Shut Down

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The fastest supercomputer in the world in 2009 will be shutdown today, according to the Los Alamos National Labs.

8599713655_c725fb6f3d_bRoadrunner, the first supercomputer to break the once-elusive petaflop barrier—one million billion calculations per second—will be decommissioned on Sunday, March 31.

Roadrunner’s design was unique, and controversial. It combined two different kinds of processors, making it a “hybrid.” It had 6,563 dual-core general-purpose processors (AMD Opterons™), with each core linked to a special graphics processor (PowerXCell 8i) called a “Cell.” The Cell was an enhanced version of a specialized processor originally designed for the Sony Playstation 3®, adapted specifically to support scientific computing.

Future supercomputers will need to improve on Roadrunner’s energy efficiency to make the power bill affordable. Future supercomputers will also need new solutions for handling and storing the vast amounts of data involved in such massive calculations.

Site Traffic Post Google PR Update

Google Page Rank Update Kills Traffic

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Google has apparently made a page rank algorithm update on about June 23rd 2011. I can tell because traffic at greginthedesert.net has dropped to about 1/100 of it’s normal traffic.

This is not the first time a Google PR update has affected traffic negatively and I’m hopeful this will be a temporary situation as it has been before.

Intel May Or May Not Make Not Intel Chips, But May

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An article on Reuters titled “Intel might make chips based on non-Intel cores” says.

“There are certain customers that would be interesting to us and certain customers that wouldn’t,” Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith told journalists after an investor event in London on Thursday.

He said Intel would be happy to produce chip cores based on its own architecture for other companies but that allowing rival architectures to be manufactured in its plants would be a tough decision.

“If Apple or Sony came to us and said ‘I want to do a product that involves your IA (Intel architecture) core and put some of my IP around it’, I wouldn’t blink. That would be fantastic business for us.”

How about Apple or Apple?

Intel Cancels Larrabee

An Intel blog updates on Intel’s graphic’s chip program and says Larabee is no longer. Anandtech has a good analysis of the blog.

Intel cancelled plans for a discrete Larrabee graphics card because it could not produce one that was competitive with existing GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA in current games. Why Intel lacked the foresight to stop from even getting to this point is tough to say. The company may have been too optimistic or genuinely lacked the experience in building discrete GPUs, something it hadn’t done in more than a decade. Maybe it truly was Pat Gelsinger’s baby.

I don’t know why Intel can’t make Larrabee happen but I am disappointed that Intel can’t be competitive with AMD and Nvidia.

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What Google Takes Away, Google Gives Back

At the end of last year Google did something with its page rank algorithm that caused my site to loose most traffic from Google. I thought the problem was due to excessive load times on my site. I used Pingdom to narrow the load times to a javascirpt from a WordPress contact form plugin. The javascript took about 4 seconds to load and was loading on every page, including pages that did not have the contact form.

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Once disabled the load times were down to a more reasonable level, although they have crept back up according to Google Webmaster Tools. As far as I can tell it’s images causing the load times. It was a good exercise for me to understand load times but it was a change made completely on Google’s part that caused the loss in traffic. The site not only got the traffic back but it increased a little. Also, when the traffic did come back the site had a significant increase in comment spam, so much that I had to turn off comments for certain posts.

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Meanwhile, I took a much need break from the blog and completely ignored everything (except approving comments) and missed that TechCrunch linked to one of my pages. Causing a nice spike in traffic.

Intel Wireless Display Announced At CES

Intel CEO Paul Otellini announced a new product at CES called Intel Wireless Display, or Wi-Di. It consists as an adapter that plugs into a HD TV set and allows streaming video and audio from a computer. That’s it.

Other than purchasing the adapter, I would expect the only requirement would be that the computer has WiFi. I would be wrong.

Processor ONE of the following: Intel® Core™ i7-620M processor, Intel Core i5-540M processor, Intel Core i5-520M processor, Intel Core i5-430M processor, Intel Core i3-350M processor, Intel Core i5-330M processor

Chipset ONE of the following: Intel® HM57, Intel HM55, Intel QM57, Intel QS57

Graphics Intel® HD Graphics

Wireless ONE of the following: Intel® Centrino® Advanced-N 6200, Intel Centrino Advanced-N +WiMax 6250, Intel Centrino Ultimate N 6300

Software Intel® My WiFi Technology and Intel Wireless Display must be pre-installed and enabled

OS Windows* 7 64-bit, Home Premium, Ultimate or Professional

Not only does it require a computer with the very latest Intel chips, it has to have all Intel chips. I expect completing technologies to come out that do not have technical requirements around a specific brand of chips. Also note: not Mac compatible.

Will Trade My Car For A Nintendo Wii

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A person in Los Lunas, NM will trade their car for a Nintendo Wii on Craigslist.

i will trade my car for a nintendo wii with all the the games and all the controlers u have and some money email me at benitezalta@q.com be sure the wii is in very good shape

No mention of what kind of car they have but they are very concerned about the condition of the Wii. And they want money to go with it.

Intel’s Parties Aren’t Like Your Parties

I like Intel’s new Sponsors Of Tomorrow commercial campaign, at least more than the dumb dancing people meant to demonstrate the multi-core processors. My favorite so far is the “Our parties aren’t like your parties” if not becasue it’s very close to reality.

The Cocoa Conspiracy: Albuquerque’s iPhone Developers

KOB recently did an interesting article on a group of independent iPhone developers in Albuquerque who work at a coffee shop and call themselves the Cocoa Conspiracy. The group includes Andrew Stone of Stone Design who has a number of both Mac and iPhone applications.

Apparently Stone Design’s Twittelator Proicon is doing well. The article also talks about a very cool sounding hot air balloon and chase crew app.

“It can actually overlay the chase group’s position and the balloon’s location and speed over a map live. That way people can plan their routes to get to the balloon and where it’s going to land,”

That’s an awesome idea, I wish I would have thought of it. Albuquerque has “Largest balloon convention in the world” according to Wikipedia so it’s fitting that a app like this should be developed in Albuquerque.

I want to hook up with these guys perhaps they can give me some help in developing my own apps. The article fails to mention what coffee shop the “The Cocoa Conspiracy” hang out at.

Update: The group has a website at cocoaconspiracy.com and apparently meet at the RB Winnings Coffee Thursdays at 9:30 am.