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Par4All aims to do “source to source” conversion of your code from Fortran or C to forms suitable for several parallel programming platforms like CUDA, OpenCL, MPI, and more.

The interest of the source-to-source approach is to capitalize on the real value of an application (its source!) and generating other sources that can be used by the better back-ends available: optimized compilers for a given processor, vendor compilers for embedded processors, CUDA or OpenCL for GPU, OpenMP, MPI… One source, run everywhere!

Supports C99 and Fortran 95, and a wide variety of platforms. Get full details, and the software, at their site.

Par4All.

Science cuda, mpi, opencl, par4all, programming

Wanted to learn Blender but never had the time or focus?  CreativeCow comes to the rescue with the first in a multi-part training series from Paolo Ciccone that covers everything you need to know, without all the “fluff”.

The Blender Survival guide is a multi-part tutorial that aims to teach you the necessary skills to get up to speed with Blender in the shortest time possible. All the essential stuff without the ‘geeky’ parts. Think of it as ‘Bear Grylls’ for Blender.

via The Blender Survival Guide – Part 1 : Blender – NEW ! Tutorial.

Graphics blender, howto, tutorial

Despicable Me, the new CG film from the folks behind ‘Ice Age’ and ‘Horton Hears a Who’, has a new video out called ‘Meet the Minions’ with an interesting little tidbit of information on what the movie is about.

Despicable Me – Meet the Minions! – Surrounded by an army of tireless, little yellow minions Gru, vanquishes all who stand in his way. That is until the day he encounters the immense will of three little orphaned girls who see something in him that no one else has ever seen: a potential Dad.

See the video below.

Graphics despicable me, movie

Stamen Design, creators of the fun MTV Music Awards twitter tracker a while back, has a new interactive twitter tracker online at NBC’s website where you can follow the firehose of twitter traffic related to the Olympics.  From their blog post:

I’ve been feeling for some time now that the data visualization space is about to go completely bananas, where “bananas” means “taken for granted” in the sense that no major cultural event will feel complete without a corresponding live data visualization. The breadth and depth of the conversation happening on twitter around the Olympics is just blowing my mind, as tragedy and farce and pop culture and stardom roll together—but remain distinct and understandable—in a display that’s changing minute-by minute as I look at it.

Twitter Tracker | NBC Olympics | 2010 Winter Games.

Science olympics, stamen design, twitter

Adobe is enjoying the 20th anniversary of the premier photo editing application Photoshop, and a new documentary has surfaced where the founders of Photoshop discuss their creation.

In this documentary, the founders of Adobe Photoshop – John Knoll, Thomas Knoll, Russell Brown, and Steve Guttman – tell the story of how an amazing coincidence of circumstances, that came together at just the right time, spawned a cultural paradigm shift unparalleled in our lifetime.

It’s a big video, 830mb if you download it.  Watch it online at AdobeTV.  Enjoy.

via Photoshop 20th Anniversary Event – Celebrate with Adobe and NAPP | Learn Adobe Photoshop CS4, Lightroom and Digital Photography | NAPP.

Graphics adobe, history, photoshop, software

Avatar is, of course, up for a Technical Oscar thanks to its impressive use of motion tracking and computer graphics, but also for it’s lesser known implementation of TrueLight and LightStage to bring some of the most realistic lighting effects ever to film.

“Computer displays have a different color space compared to film; colors that I can see on a computer, I can’t always reproduce on film and vice-versa,” said Mark Wolforth, an electrical and biomedical engineer who specializes in imaging with FilmLight Limited. “Truelight is a color management system that keeps the colors the same so whether you are looking at a scene on film or you are looking at the same scene on a computer screen, the colors will look exactly the same.”

The article gets in-depth into the technical requirements and achievements of the technology.

via FOXNews.com – Oscar-Worthy Science and Engineering.

Graphics, Science avatar, lightstage, oscar, truelight

Type Ia supernova have been used for many years as a standard candle to measure distances in astronomy. These supernova are thought to occur when a white dwarf star gains mass from a nearby companion. The white dwarf can continue to gain in mass until it reaches about 1.38 solar masses. At that point the white dwarf will go supernova with a consistent peak brightness. Knowing that peak brightness, one can then measure the distance to the star now gone supernova, and can thus measure the distance to the host galaxy. Using this standard candle, astronomers were able to measure the expansion of the universe. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is accelerating.

NASA has just released new images from the Chandra X-ray Observatory of our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda. If Type 1A supernova are caused by accretion, then astronomers would expect to find significant X-ray emission in advance of the supernova. However, if Type 1A supernova are caused by a binary pair of white dwarfs merging, then astronomers would expect to find lower X-ray emission in advance of the supernova. Chandra’s images show that X-Rays are 40 times lower than would be expected if Type 1A supernova are caused by accretion. Therefore it is more likely that Type 1A supernova are caused by merger.

Until now, this binary pair merger of white dwarfs was thought to be rare. Chandra’s images show that this is the more likely case, at least for Andromeda and the six elliptical galaxies that were observed. More studies need to be conducted to see if this holds true for other galaxies.

This composite image of M31 (also known as the Andromeda galaxy) shows X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in gold, optical data from the Digitized Sky Survey in light blue and infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope in red.

via : NASA’s Chandra Reveals Origin of Key Cosmic Explosions
via : Andromeda Galaxy

Science andromeda, astronomy, chandra, nasa, supernova

An interactive chart on the Financial Times shows compensations, profits, and losses of five of the biggest financial institutions in the US from 2000 to 20009.  Simply drag the slider left and right and marvel at the growth of those blue circles.

FT.com / Companies / Banks – Banks earnings: how compensation relates to performance. via ChartPorn

Graphics bank, infographic, interactive

Yahoo has published a few details about the up and coming additions to their YUI Charts library named YUI3.  In particular, I found this intriguing:

The modularity of the Charts component within the Flash Player (our current rendering engine of choice) is fully paralleled in its JavaScript wrapper. From the JS developer’s point of view, you are working with a set of JS components, with all method calls, display list changes and property assignments seamlessly transmitted to Flash and back. (This abstraction will be even more crucial when we move beyond a single rendering engine.)

Move beyond a Single Rendering Engine?  Could this mean that they’ll be moving beyond Flash charts and into JavaScript/Canvas charts? Maybe Silverlight?  Who knows.  What would you like to see?

An Update on YUI 3 Charts » Yahoo! User Interface Blog (YUIBlog).

Science yahoo, yui3

Forget 60hz, 120hz, or 240hz Televisions, the new Panasonic TX-P42G20B boasts an (almost) unbelievable 600Hz refresh rate, along with several other features:

The set also sports Panasonic’s VieraCast internet access system, and DLNA client access to play back JPEG, AAC, MP3, MPEG 2, AVCHD and DivX HD files. It has an SD card slot and you can hook up a hard drive to its USB port and record incoming programmes, Panasonic said.

Ok, ok.  So it’s “600Hz Frame Interpolation technology”, but still that’s pretty impressive.  On sale now for £1100, it’s the first of a new line of LCD and plasma TV’s to come on in the following months.

via First Freeview HD TV goes on sale • Register Hardware.

Hardware display, panasonic, plasma, tv