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Computer scientists at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., are asking industry for novel technologies and approaches that offer dramatic advances in high-performance military computer performance, and enable so-called extreme scale computing -- the notion of exceeding today's peta-scale computing to achieve one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. DARPA released a broad agency announcement Monday (DARPA-BAA-10-78) for the Omnipresent High Performance Computing (OHPC) program to help develop tomorrow's high-performance computers to meet the relentlessly increasing demands for greater performance, higher energy efficiency, ease of programmability, dependability, and security in aerospace and defense computing for military...

here is a fervent debate going on in the open source community about cloud computing. Will the cloud kill open source? [2] Will multi-tenancy services make cloud providers need to hide the source, as a recent Forbes article [3] suggests? I recently went to the best expert I could find on the matter to ask: Marten Mickos [4]. Mickos is the CEO of "private cloud" software (aka virtualization) maker Eucalyptus Systems [5]. He earned himself Open Source Hall of Fame status as the charismatic former CEO of MySQL. Mickos was adamant that open source not only won't kill the cloud,...

Satellite systems in space keyed to detect nuclear events and environmental gasses currently face a kind of data logjam because their increasingly powerful sensors produce more information than their available bandwidth can easily transmit. Experiments conducted by Sandia National Laboratories at the International Space Station preliminarily indicate that the problem could be remedied by orbiting more complex computer chips to pre-reduce the large data stream. While increased satellite on-board computing capabilities ideally would mean that only the most useful information would be transmitted to Earth, an unresolved question had been how well the latest in computing electronics would fare in...

OpenOffice 3.2 is available for download. Improvements in the latest release of the open source office suite include faster start-ups, improved compatibility with other office programs, and several new features (with special attention to the Calc spreadsheet program.) At the same time, the OpenOffice.org team is celebrating its tenth anniversary and a claimed total 300 million downloads of the office software since its initial launch. They say that just over a year since its launch, OpenOffice 3 has logged over one third of those downloads from the central server alone. (Thanks in a large part to Germans, Czechs, and Poles,...

The military is a major user of supercomputers (the fastest computers on the planet). These machines were first developed, as were the first computers, for military applications. These ultra-powerful computers are used for code breaking, and to help design weapons (including nukes) and equipment (especially electronics). The military is also needs lots of computing power for data mining (pulling useful information, about the enemy, from ever larger masses of information.) Because there's never enough money to buy all the super-computers (which are super expensive) needed, military researchers have come up with ways to do it cheaper. A decade ago, it...

Robert Charette // Fri, August 07, 2009 The London Daily Mail published a long, interesting and disturbing story yesterday about the ease with which security experts were able to hack the supposedly "unforgeable" new UK ID card for foreign nationals and change the data within the embedded microchip within minutes. Given that the hacked ID card uses the same technology as is to be used in National ID cards for UK residents in the next few years, the implications are obvious. The Daily Mail says that when the UK government was told of its findings, the government dismissed them, saying,...

IBM plans to announce on Tuesday that it will supply the world's fastest supercomputer to the U.S. Department of Energy in the next few years, according to numerous reports. Not only will the machine, called Sequoia, be the fastest supercomputer to date, it will blow the current record-holder out of the water. IBM's Roadrunner, located at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, was the first system to reach 1.026 petaflops (a petaflop is equal to a quadrillion calculations per second; the "flops" stands for floating point operations per second). But only seven months after the Roadrunner took...

Terascale still moving forward With our time at IDF quickly drawing to a close, we are in the final stretch of content from the show.  While I didn’t get to the keynotes on the morning on mobility, we have the general basis of their contents here as well as some other interesting topics like terascale processors and Intel’s upcoming Extreme .Terascale Computing UpdateLast year at IDF Intel first started to demonstrate and discuss their terascale computing research project that featured a that was a dramatic shift from anything Intel had done in the past.  The was built out of 80...

The ongoing tussle between Intel and AMD has dominated the news in recent weeks, but there's another potential battleground shaping up for Intel that could have a huge impact on personal computing. A major topic I want to cover over the next several months is the looming showdown as the smart phone industry tries to develop more powerful computers, and the PC industry tries to build smaller and smaller computers. This week has provided a decent glimpse of Intel's vision of where it thinks the industry needs to go with its Silverthorne processor, designed for a new concept of computer...

GRID.ORG said it's finished gridding and stopped doing research on critical health research. It doesn't say why it's boldly stopped gridding apart from saying it's completed its mission to boldly demonstrate the benefits of large scale Internet based grid computing. It suggests how to uninstall your grid agent, here. One reader said: "I had 10 years & 28 days of accumulated participation since February 2002 beginning with a K6-2-450MHz and ending with a dual Xeon 3.6 GHz XP-Pro rig." Surely there's more that can be done?

Twenty years before most scientists expected it, a commercial company has announceda quantum computer that promises to massively speed up searches and optimisation calculations. D-Wave of British Columbia has promised to demonstrate a quantum computer next Tuesday, that can carry out 64,000 calculations simultaneously (in parallel "universes"), thanks to a new technique which rethinks the already-uncanny world of quantum computing. But the academic world is taking a wait-and-see approach. D-Wave is the world's only "commercial" quantum computing company, backed by more than $20 million of venture capital (there are more commercial ventures in the related field of quantum cryptography). Its...

An individual "dopant" atom has been spied interfering with the flow of electrons through a silicon transistor for the first time. Researchers say the feat could help scientists squeeze more power out of conventional computers and ultimately develop silicon-based quantum computers. Dopants are chemical impurities that affect the flow of electrons through a conducting or semiconducting material. They are deliberately added to pure silicon, for example, to create different types of electronic component. To analyse a lone dopant atom in action, Sven Rogge and colleagues at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands cryogenically cooled 35-nanometre-wide silicon wires, taken from...

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 21 — The Pentagon awarded almost $500 million in contracts to I.B.M. and Cray Inc. on Tuesday to design a supercomputer several times as fast as today’s most powerful systems. The Cray contract is for $250 million and the I.B.M. contract is for $244 million, to be spent during the next four years. They prevailed over Sun Microsystems.The contracts are part of the High Productivity Computing Systems program being led by the Pentagon’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. The program aims to achieve and surpass the ability to calculate more than a...

The Royal Society (RS) announced yesterday that we may all know a lot less about a lot more than we ever thought we did as humans. A total of 1.5 million pages and 250,000 trillion articles will be available electronically to technologists. A new joint study by the Royal Society in Halifax, the California Polytechnical Institute, and the University of Pittsburgh in New Brunswick has found that people who have been publicly educated using high technology are likely to be twice as not as they are smart. This backs up several soon to be conducted prior studies which disclose disturbing...

Stanford researchers' new etching method shows promise for bulk manufacturing of nanotube-electronics. Semiconducting carbon nanotubes could be the centerpiece of low-power, ultra-fast electronics of the future. The challenge is getting them to work with today's manufacturing processes. Now researchers at Stanford University have made an important advance toward large-scale nanotube electronics. They have created functional transistors using an etching process that can be integrated with the methods used to carve out silicon-based computer chips. A major roadblock to making carbon-nanotube transistors has been the difficulty of separating semiconducting tubes from a typical batch of nanotubes, in which about a third...

HAL may soon be getting some company. But unlike the famous computer companion in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the first space-based supercomputer — so described because it will be by far the most powerful computer in space — is already nearing reality. Engineering researchers at the University of Florida and Honeywell Aerospace are designing and building the computer projected to operate as much as 100 times faster than any computer in space today. Expected to be launched aboard a NASA rocket on a test mission in 2009, the computer is needed to process rapidly increasing amounts of data...

Even if quantum computers can be made to work, there will still be two big obstacles preventing quantum networks becoming a reality. First, quantum bits, or qubits, stored in matter will have to be transferred to photons to be transmitted over long distances. Secondly, errors that creep in during transmission have to be corrected. Two unrelated studies have now shown how to clear these hurdles. Both studies use quantum entanglement, a spooky property that links particles however far apart they are. Measuring a quantum property on one particle immediately affects the other, and this effect can be used to “teleport”...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 358 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 75th place (with 1,020 active CPUs - 70,500 completed Work Units and 12.75 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please...

Intel Terascale Brings 80 Cores To Your DesktopIf you were impressed with dual core technology and quad core processors seem a bit like overkill, how about Terascale processing with 80 cores? Sound far fetched? Intel doesn’t think so. Head on over to PCPerspective for the rest of the article. For our discussions here, the term “terascale” will refer to a processor with 32 or more cores. Moving away from the “large” cores seen in the Core 2 Duo and Athlon 64 lines from Intel and AMD, the cores in a terascale processor will be much simpler (kind of like we...

Computer designers at the University of Rochester are going ballistic. "Everyone has been trying to make better transistors by modifying current designs, but what we really need is the next paradigm," says Quentin Diduck, a graduate student at the University who thought up the radical new design. "We've gone from the relay, to the tube, to semiconductor physics. Now we're taking the next step on the evolutionary track." That next step goes by the imposing name of "Ballistic Deflection Transistor," and it's as far from traditional transistors as tubes. Instead of running electrons through a transistor as if they were...