"As the shift to open source software continues, computational biology will become even more accessible, and even more powerful, while intellectual property and other bureaucracies continue to hobble traditional forms of research." Spot on, I'm very glad to see this happening :)

Here we go, material for curiosity cloning, life detection via image compression, etc. etc.

NVIDIA Fermi preview...

Of any interest to our AI gurus?

Nice opinion piece by the creator of C++ Bjarne Stroustrup. Substitute "industry" with "science" and many considerations still apply :)

"At a symposium at the Dutch Spinoza-instituut on 8 December, 2009, string theorist Erik Verlinde introduced a theory that derives Newton's classical mechanics. In his theory, gravity exists because of a difference in concentration of information in the empty space between two masses and its surroundings. He does not consider gravity as fundamental, but as an emergent phenomenon that arises from a deeper microscropic reality. A relativistic extension of his argument leads directly to Einstein's equations."

For Dario: the PI computation record was established on a single desktop computer using a cache optimized algorithm. Previous record was obtained by a cluster of hundreds of computers. The cache optimized algorithm was 20 times faster.

Zimmerman is the same guy behind the MPFR multiprecision floating-point library, if I recall correctly: http://www.mpfr.org/credit.html I've not read the book... Multiprecision arithmetic is a huge topic though, at least from the scientific and number theory point of view if not for its applications to engineering problems. "The art of computer programming" is probably the closest thing to a bible for computer scientists :)

"btw: we will very soon have the very same processor in the new iMac .... what record are you going to beat with it?" Fastest Linux install on an iMac :)

Finally a massively multi-core general-purpose architecture.

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.

Open-source cloud computing platform from NASA... Nice!

A recently-published book by the Ubuntu Community Manager, Jono Bacon. I just started reading it: lots of information, experiences and revealing hints on how open-source communities are born and evolve today.

Awesome!

Albeit a bit dated, this is the classical Eric Raymond paper about the self-organizing open source model (the bazaar) compared to the usual closed software development model (the cathedral). Is science today more a bazaar or a cathedral?

See, I told you smashing things around in the solar system is useful!

Illuminating article about corporations trying to exploit "open source" and not getting what they want.

This is from Carlos, the guy who gave a science coffee talk a couple of months ago.