The Tokyo Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy announced the details of the “Tsub­ame 2.0,” the next-generation super­com­puter sys­tem for the uni­ver­sity that will start oper­a­tion in the fall of 2010, at a press meet­ing. The com­pu­ta­tion capac­ity of the sys­tem is 2.39 PFLOPS (petaflops, double-precision value), which ranks sec­ond in the “Top500,” a rank­ing of super­com­put­ers, as of June 2010. “It will be the first petaflops com­puter in Japan,” said Satoshi Mat­suoka, pro­fes­sor at the Global Sci­en­tific Infor­ma­tion and Com­put­ing Cen­ter (GSIC) of the uni­ver­sity. “And it will be the first world-class super­com­puter sys­tem for our university.”

How­ever, the actual con­struc­tion of the sys­tem, which will be con­ducted by NEC Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co, has yet to be done. The sys­tem has the “vector-scalar mix­ture archi­tec­ture,” Mat­suoka said. But the com­pu­ta­tion capac­ity of its graph­ics pro­cess­ing units (GPUs) accounts for 90% of the total com­pu­ta­tion capac­ity, mak­ing the sys­tem more like a vec­tor com­puter. There­fore, the per­for­mance of the sys­tem slightly dif­fers depend­ing on the type of cal­cu­la­tion. Specif­i­cally, the per­for­mance tar­get in terms of the Lin­pack bench­mark is 1.0−1.4 PFLOPS, which ranks third or fourth in the Top500 as of June 2010. On the other hand, for cal­cu­la­tions that are suited for vec­tor com­put­ers such as weather pre­dic­tion, the per­for­mance can be more than 150 TFLOPS (ter­aflops), which is much higher than the world record (50 TFLOPS). →

21st June, 2010 Comments Off

This year human­ity cel­e­brates cen­ten­nial of the birth of one of the great explor­ers and inven­tors of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Jacques-Yves Cousteau was a French naval offi­cer. He and Émile Gag­nan designed the Aqua-Lung, the first self-contained under­wa­ter breath­ing appa­ra­tus, or scuba. It made longer trips under­wa­ter pos­si­ble and freed divers from heavy hel­mets to float as if in space. He brought the mys­te­ri­ous under­wa­ter world to mil­lions by film­ing his adven­tures on the Calypso, a ship he turned into a lab and field research ves­sel. From this ship Cousteau shot the film “The Silent World”, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 1956.

Har­ness­ing the power of visual imagery, Cousteau cre­ated more than 120 doc­u­men­taries and 50 books, and brought aware­ness of the marine envi­ron­ment to mil­lions of peo­ple around the planet. The world stands in his debt for inspir­ing entire gen­er­a­tions of marine biol­o­gists, film­mak­ers, pho­tog­ra­phers and con­ser­va­tion­ists. Later in his life, Cousteau saw that the ocean’s resources are not infi­nite, and sought to edu­cate the world about the fragility of the envi­ron­ment. The Cousteau legacy con­tin­ues through his chil­dren and grand­chil­dren, who have fol­lowed in his foot­steps to edu­cate and inspire. Jacques Cousteau said, “peo­ple pro­tect what they love.” As a com­mu­nity, we must also con­tinue his legacy, to share our images and videos with the world, show­ing species and places that most peo­ple will never see, but which are vitally impor­tant to con­serve. →

11th June, 2010 Comments Off

Math­e­mati­cian Vladimir Arnold, per­haps one of the best known and highly cited Russ­ian sci­en­tist, has died yes­ter­day today at the age of 72. He was receiv­ing treat­ment in France, but his dis­ease was stronger, reports lenta.ru, cit­ing a source close to the fam­ily. Arnold was one of the great­est math­e­mati­cians of the XX cen­tury and the author of the series of works on the topol­ogy, the­ory of dif­fer­en­tial equa­tions, alge­braic geom­e­try, the­ory of smooth maps and clas­si­cal mechan­ics. →

3rd June, 2010 Comments Off