IBM & Los Alamos supercomputer might be as fast as your brain.

Not even a week after the new Roadrunner supercomputer was juiced up and put to work, scientists are hard at work trying to push the machine to its limits. Housed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the primary goal of the supercomputer is to model the safety of the United States' aging nuclear weapons stockpile. At over a certified petaflop, the machine renders calculations in a day that would take every person on Earth a calculator and 46 years to accomplish.

A supercomputer of this power will be incredibly useful for modeling things other than nuclear decay and global climate. At over a quadrillion – a million billion – calculations per second, Roadrunner is the only computer on Earth that can keep up with one of the few things more amazing than itself: the human brain.

Los Alamos researchers are putting this power to work with a program dubbed PetaVision. The program was created to model neuron and synapse interaction in the visual cortex of the human brain. The brain uses over a billion neurons and trillions of synapses alone to process the visual information it receives and is one of the most complicated processes known to exist in grey matter.

Supercomputers like Roadrunner bring new possibilities for modeling human recognition systems, and the advances are not likely to stop there. In the past, computers have been unable to flawlessly perform cognitive tasks that the human brain does easily; tasks like picking out a face in a crowd, or detecting oncoming vehicles in traffic. Such a large step up in processing power may enable scientists to breech this difficult wall in mimicry.

The researchers used PetaVision to set a processing record with Roadrunner, spinning up to an astonishing 1.144 petaflop/s. "Just a week after formal introduction of the machine to the world, we are already doing computational tasks that existed only in the realm of imagination a year ago,” explains Terry Wallace, associate director for Science, Technology and Engineering at Los Alamos.

The supercomputer's architecture is based on a hybrid node system. Each node contains two AMD Opteron dual-core and four PowerXCell 8i processers. The PowerXCell CPUs are derived from the same Cell processor used in the Sony Playstation 3 and act as computational accelerators for the Opterons.

Source from DailyTech

Intel says open host controller specifications have cost gazillions of dollars to develop

According to Intel’s Nick Knupffer, there are a lot of myths going around concerning USB 3.0 and Intel’s involvement in the development of the specification. Knupffer wrote a blog post on Intel’s website in an attempt to dispel these myths.

Knupffer points out that Intel is not developing the USB 3.0 specification. What Intel is developing is the host controller spec which Knupffer describes as a “Dummies Guide” to building a USB 3.0 compatible piece of silicon.

Knupffer says in the blog post that Intel has invested “gazillions of dollars and bazillions of engineering man hours” in developing the open host controller and despite its significant investment still plans to give the specification to competing manufacturers for free. Knupffer also says that Intel loves it when CPU performance is used to the max and the huge increase in bandwidth of USB 3.0 will mean larger file transfers and more processor usage. This in turn is expected to lead to an increased demand for faster processors.

AMD and NVIDIA leveled allegations at Intel recently that claim Intel was withholding the open host controller specifications in an attempt to give itself a market advantage. Intel and AMD claim that by withholding the specification the lead Intel will have in bringing USB 3.0 compliant products to market will be in the six to nine month range.

Intel denied the allegations of withholding the open host controller specifications at the time AMD and NVIDIA made their charges public and announced they would be designing their own open host controller. In Knupffer’s blog post, he again says that Intel isn’t holding the open host controller specifications back from competitors.

According to Knupffer, the significant investment in the open host controller specifications is specifically to get USB 3.0 into the market faster, so why would it withhold the specification. Intel still maintains that the specifications aren’t ready and that it plans to give the specifications to other manufacturers in the second half of 2008.

The final myth that Knupffer addresses in his post is that USB 3.0 technology borrows heavily from technology used in PCI Express. Intel points out that it was involved with both the PCI-SIG and the USB-IF at the design stage for both PCI Express and for USB 3.0. The insinuation form Intel is that the technology that is similar in both devices was developed on its dime.

Source from DailyTech