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who wants 100 cores ... future of PAGMO?

The problem with this flurry of activity today regarding multicore architectures is that it is really unclear which one will be the winner in the long run. Never understimate the power of inertia, especially in the software industry (after all, people are still programming in COBOL and Fortran today). For instance, NVIDIA gives you the Teslas with 10000 cores, but then you have to rewrite extensive parts of your code in order to take advantage of this. Is this an investment worth undertaking? Difficult to say, it would certainly be if the whole software world moves into that direction (which is not happening - yet?). But then you have other approaches coming out, suche as the Cell processor by IBM (the one on the PS3) which has really impressive floating point performance and, of course, a completely different programming model. The nice thing about this Tilera processor seems to be that it is a general-purpose processor, which may not require extensive re-engineering of existing code (but I'm really hypothesizing, since the thechincal details are not very abundant on their website).

Moreover PaGMO computation model is more towards systems with distributed memory, and not with shared memory (i.e. multi-core). In the latter, at certain point the memory access becomes the bottleneck.

what about ESA?

I said "more" because we already gave them money in the form of Sophia and Atlas :) If we want to be consistent in promoting "open" efforts (open innovation, open source, open governance, etc.) we should avoid Apple like the plague. They are far far worse than Microsoft in terms of closedness, secrecy, shady market practices and vendor lock-in. Just google a bit and you will find lots of example of their behaviour.

cant' really argue about the Apple practices, although I ve read some things. I think the NASA app is more like a news feed and nothing more. But that online crowdsourcing game we had in mind, now that would be cool in a mobile version - new mobiles also have accelerometers nowadays

a pity that they don't show the rat brain also ... anything published available would also be nice ...

Scary... I liked the "Each time the robot has behaved differently" part though :)

"climate policy-makers need to pay much more attention to restricting short-lived pollutants, such as methane, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and aerosols. This could create significant changes in the local and global climate quite quickly, whereas the effects of efforts to reduce emissions of long-lived carbon dioxide will not be seen for many years."

interesting indeed ... but coming at the right time before copenhagn?

These conclusions come too late to have a real impact on decisions that will be taken in Copenhagen, I assume. But I think it is a hot topic as climate change 'solutions' that work QUICKLY are more and more needed!!

well a bit misleading title...

Just read about this, it looks like an interesting example of bottom-up innovation and self-organization.

This is an idependent organisation reviewing healthcare studies and basically judging the results. Something like the ACT for international medicine. Sounds interesting in the approach. Their suggestion for swine-flu prevention: wash your hands frequently. Nothing helps better.

May be of interest for Friederike and Nina... Link to the full report at the bottom of the page.

thanks Marek! hope that you are doing fine!!!

What if heuristic algorithms (PSO, DE, ...) do not actually simulate flocking birds or school gish beahviour ?!