Abstraction
Source: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/abstraction.png
Posts
Blizzard: modeling the climate change
Impressive and elegant new German supercomputer: Specifications: HPC Cluster ("blizzard") IBM p575 "Power6" cluster water cooled 16 dual core CPUs per node Total size: 264 nodes, 8448 cores 249 compute nodes 12 I/O nodes 3 interactive nodes 18,8 GigaFlops/core Total system peak performance: 158 TeraFlops/s Top500: Rank 27 in 06/09 20 TeraByte memory 3 PetaByte GPFS file system (additional 3 PetaByte in 2011) 8 x Qlogic 288 port 4 x DDR Infiniband switches bandwidth: 16 GigaByte/s node to node (bidirectional ) 25.4 km Infiniband cables http://www.dkrz.de/dkrz/about/hardware/HPC_Cluster But Blizzard is connected to the Data archive: HPSS: High Performance Storage System 6 Sun StorageTek SL8500 tape libraries 8 robots per library 10 000 media slots per library 73 tape drives total capacity: 60 PetaByte. 60.000 media (T10000 A/B, LTO4, 9940B and 9840C ) 500 TeraByte disk cache projected fill rate: 10 PetaByte/year bidirectional bandwidth: 3...
Computer graphics in Star Wars (1977)
This is a video documentary about how one scene in Episode IV was prepared, the scene in particular is when the rebel pilots were planning how to attack the Death Star. The Commander showed them an animation of the Death Star and where to fire. Of course, this is 1976, no high end computer graphics cards exists yet, so Larry Cuba describe the steps in the 3D modeling based on photographs of the real miniature models. Check how he's controlling the rotation in real time (awesome) with big controls (no mouse neither exists). The final touch was to render each scene, shot by shot, in the computer screen with and automatic camera capturing in film. Via Topless Robot .
Updating nightmare
Before I must say, I have a laptop with dual boot, Mandriva in Dr. Jekyll and MS-Vista was Mr. Hyde. Yes, it was because two days ago I decided to update to the well recommended Win7. Few days ago I received a legal and nice DVD with the OS, the 64 bits version to upgrade Vista Home Premium. Then, I backup all my personal data. My laptop is an Acer Aspire 5520, AMD Athlon 64 x2, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HD , Nvidia 7000M, since I have it, I never touch the disc partitions, because the disc was already divided into 3, one part for the Acer recovery tools (3 GB), 70 GB for Vista, and the rest I used for Mandriva (from 2007 to now 2010 versions). Everything works, well, of course Vista was slow and frustrating, I keep it because I share this computer and when I had time, I played games unsupported in Linux. After the bunnies convinced me to upgrade, I put the disc and upgrade to W7. Easy, after few clicks and 1 hr, W7 was installed. I rebooted the laptop, and waited for the final installat...
The history of computing (video)
The next is nice and educational video about computer history and the future, I like the analogies with biological systems. Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo .