Group items tagged

not an expert, but pattern recognising seems a bit tricky ?

Finally a massively multi-core general-purpose architecture.

Well, nice, but I wonder how much cache per core will be available... With 48 cores a single memory bus becomes nothing more than one big (small? :) ) bottleneck.

Apparently they have separated L2 cache per-tile (i.e., every two processors) and a high speed bus connecting the tiles. As usual, whether it will be fast enough will depend from the specific applications (which BTW is also true for other current multi-core architectures). The nice thing is of course that porting software to this architecture will be one order of magnitude less difficult than going to Tesla/Fermi/CELL architectures. Also, this architecture will also be suitable for other tasks than floating point computations (damn engineers polluting computer science :P) and it has the potential to be more future-proof than other solutions.

Awesome, they managed. (this is a different deal as the micro ones )

this looks like a very nice project back in 2005 ...

Does it also attack people to capture their fish & chips like those beasts we have here in St. Ives?

Tokyo has a very large population and one of the smallest crime rates in the world, in fact Tokyo is known to be the safest big city in the world (w.r.t. crime). It is hard to believe that the crime rate in L.A. is in the same order of magnitude.

The new battery, which is described in the journal Nature, is based on an organic molecule-called a quinone-that's found in plants such as rhubarb and can be cheaply synthesized from crude oil.

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. The simulation results made me think of Jojo's attempts to make a self-assembling space structure. Seems he may have been on the right track, just not thinking big enough

:-P Thanks Thijs... I do not agree with the premise of the article that a possible correlation of energy dissipation in living systems and their fitness means that one is the cause for the other - it may just be that both go hand-in-hand because of the nature of the world that we live in. Maybe there is such a drive for pre-biotic systems (like crystals and amino acids), but once life as we know it exists (i.e., heredity + mutation) it is hard to see the need for an amendment of Darwin's principles. The following just misses the essence of Darwin: "If England's approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that "the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve." Darwin's principle in its simplest expression just says that if a genome is more effective at reproducing it is more likely to dominate the next generation. The beauty of it is that there is NO need for a steering mechanism (like maximize energy dissipation) any random set of mutations will still lead to an increase of reproductive effectiveness. BTW: what does "better at dissipating energy" even mean? If I run around all the time I will have more babies? Most species that prove to be very successful end up being very good at conserving energy: trees, turtles, worms. Even complexity of an organism is not a recipe for evolutionary success: jellyfish have been successful for hundreds of millions of years while polar bears are seem to be on the way out.

Scientists at MIT have traced 13 billion years of galaxy evolution, from shortly after the Big Bang to the present day. Their simulation, named Illustris, captures both the massive scale of the Universe and the intriguing variety of galaxies - something previous modelers have struggled to do. It produces a Universe that looks remarkably similar to what we see through our telescopes, giving us greater confidence in our understanding of the Universe, from the laws of physics to our theories about galaxy formation. "Simulation is the future of innovation"

Responding to calls from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), a working group of the American Statistical Association has developed a whitepaper detailing how statisticians and computer scientists can contribute to administration research initiatives and priorities. The whitepaper includes a lot of topics central to machine learning and data mining, so please take a look.

I guess Norvig is trumping Chomsky big time if this is the attitude of the NSF :)))

Another Appathon with the aim to allow access to vast amounts of 'space data' and then play around.. In other words, a neural network's guy wet dream, so Paul, what are you waiting for?

I'm not really an app developer :P But I'll think about it

Travel back in time and play with the original Windows 3.11. back when using a computer still meant loading EMM386 in your config.sys ;) Remember that expensive big box of hardware you were so proud of? Now the whole thing is simulated in your browser. Using JavaScript. And still runs faster. This is a collection of curated Windows 3.x software, meant to show the range of software products available for the 3.x Operating System in the early 1990s.

Awesome :) It's even got skifree!

So we need lasers. Big lasers. :)

anybody want's to have a closer look at this?

Computer scientists have been searching for years for a type of problem that a quantum computer can solve but that any possible future classical computer cannot. Now they've found one.

Oh this is a big one! Unfortunately, the problem is only relativized (i.e. you need an oracle for it) but nevertheless an impressive result.

The rules for a stellar death seem pretty simple. If the star isn't that massive, it burns out into a carbon-rich remnant called a white dwarf. If it's big enough, the star ends in a bang, exploding in a supernova that can leave behind a neutron star or a black hole.

At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft announced its moves to embrace the next big thing in computing: quantum computing. Later this year, Microsoft will release a new quantum computing programming language, with full Visual Studio integration, along with a quantum computing simulator. With these, developers will be able to both develop and debug quantum programs implementing quantum algorithms.