Hands On and On Interface

Most excellent multi-touch sensing screen computer interface.

More detailed presentation video here.

I knew all those childhood piano lessons would finally payoff.

Warp Factor Mr Zulu

Siemens has achieved a transmission speed of 107 gigabits per second over a single optical fiber.

They have developed a new transmission and receiving system that is able to process data directly before and after its conversion into optical signals using electrical processing only.

Current systems handling very high data rates have to split signals into multiple lower data-rate signals and later reconvert them from optical to electrical, a process that adds to costs and reduces network capacity.

107-gigabits-per-second transmission could send two DVDs in a second.

Fully immerisve scratch and sniff VR still on track.

Gordon Moore on Gordon Moore

"In terms of size [of transistor] you can see that we're approaching the size of atoms which is a fundamental barrier, but it'll be two or three generations before we get that far - but that's as far out as we've ever been able to see.

We have another 10 to 20 years before we reach a fundamental limit.

By then they'll be able to make bigger chips and have transistor budgets in the billions."

Media to start proposing new 'Laws' exponentially in 3, 2 1 ...

GPU's loaded for Bear.

"..a low-cost parallel data processing GPU system can conservatively surpass the latest CPU-based systems by two to five times in a wide variety of tasks.

...optimized code showed breathtaking performance gains of 20 to 40 times over CPUs."

I love the smell of TeraFlops in the morning.

Internet Enemies List 2006

Good news - Nepal, Maldives and Libya off the list.

Not so Good - Egypt added.

Reliably Bad - North Korea, Saudi Arabia, China, Cuba, Syria and Iran.

Nothing that an overlapping layer of geostationary satellite feeds wouldn't fix. Then just give them all gmail and blogs and let them have at it.

Nvidia CUDA - new architecture '07.

"CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), a new computing architecture for using thread computing on Nvidia GPUs (graphics processing units).

GPU computing with CUDA is a new approach to computing where hundreds of on-chip processor cores simultaneously communicate and cooperate to solve complex computing problems up to 100 times faster than traditional approaches.

"CUDA," will also allow the graphics chip to simulate physics processing and aid in general-purpose computing."

Nvidia will offer its new architecture first in its GeForce 8800 graphics processors which are geared toward consumers and gamers. -(great review and in depth architecture here)

Its professional line of Quadro graphics cards, which will hit the market in early 2007."

Another welcome step toward the return of the man-sized drawing table.

Roadrunner to break 'PetaFlop' barrier.

"Part-funded by the US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, the machine is to be built by IBM in conjunction with Los Alamos.......one of the laboratory's primary purposes is to run the US nuclear stockpile stewardship programme.

....Over the past few years IBM's Blue Gene system has continually beaten all records in computational power, peaking at a massive 207 teraflops. A teraflop is one billion operations per second, whereas a petaflop — the holy grail of scientific computing — equals 1,000 billion operations a second. It is estimated that Roadrunner will be able to reach a hitherto unthinkable 1.6 petaflops.

.......the most advanced rival effort is a Japanese project, where, with 110bn Yen (£497m) of government funding, Japanese research agency Riken hopes to have a 10-petaflop computer by 2012.