VizWorld.com

I found this little extension while reading Flowing Data. I am not sure I want to graph my conversations, especially with Amazon. I know I spend too much money there already.

Graph Your Inbox is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to graph Gmail activity over time. You can use it to visualize your communication with friends, your Facebook activity, when you purchased items on Amazon or how often you use certain words or phrases. We provide the same search functionality used by Gmail, but instead of a list of messages we show you a graph of your email trends over time.

via Graph Your Inbox.

Graphics gmail

Sandy Bridge is Intel’s latest CPU with a twist. Sandy Bridge is not simply a 32nm CPU. Sandy Bridge also contains an on-die GPU that shares the L3 cache of the CPU. This on-die GPU doubles the performance of Intel’s HD Graphics today. The GPU makes use of fixed function hardware, which is the opposite design approach for many GPUs today. The idea behind this was that with fixed function hardware increases the performance efficiency and die area. The downside is that you lose some flexibility. Not everything in the GPU is fixed function hardware. The GPU does come with programmable shader hardware which is called Execution Units (EUs). When Sandy Bridge is launched, it will come with two different configurations for the GPU. The first version will have 6 EUs while the second version will have 12 EUs. Sandy Bridge will start showing up in systems during the first quarter of 2011. AnandTech has posted a great review of the Sandy Bridge architecture.

The largest performance improvement on Sandy Bridge vs. current Westmere architectures actually has nothing to do with the CPU, it’s all graphics. While the CPU cores show a 10 – 30% improvement in performance, Sandy Bridge graphics performance is easily double what Intel delivered with Clarkdale/Arrandale at the beginning of the year.

The Sandy Bridge GPU is on-die built out of the same 32nm transistors as the CPU cores. The GPU is on its own power island and clock domain. The GPU can be powered down or clocked up independently of the CPU. Graphics turbo is available on both desktop and mobile parts, and you get more bins with graphics turbo on Sandy Bridge than you did with Arrandale.

via Intel’s Sandy Bridge Architecture Exposed – AnandTech

Hardware intel, sandy bridge

No, Intel cannot raytrace Wolfenstein on a laptop. Instead what they did was raytrace the game on four servers, then feed it to a laptop over a gigabit ethernet connection. You can find out more by viewing the project’s homepage.

Research project Wolfenstein: Ray Traced gets demonstrated inside Intel Labs in Santa Clara, CA. See the highly detailed chandelier model with near realistic glass reflecting and refracting with amazing clarity. Also see a shiny car reflect movement from its surroundings, and other potential game-play enhancing features. The demo setup consists of four machines using Intel’s Knights Ferry card as rendering server that feeds a small laptop with the stunning visualizations playing at a high frame rate.

via : Wolfenstein Gets Ray Traced, On a Laptop!

Hardware intel, raytrace

NVidia has today released the newest version of their popular CUDA Toolkit, version 3.2, that boasts all around performance improvements and several new features.   The new version includes a new Sparse Matrix library ‘CUSPARSE’ to offset the command CUBLAS and CULAPACK libraries that excel at dense matrices.  Also, they have a new GPU-accelerated random-number library ‘CURAND’.  GPU accelerated random numbers may seem a bit pointless at first glance, but random number entropy is a big deal in large-scale crypto, so I’m sure certain government labs will love that feature.  But even that’s not all, as they’ve added some nice cluster management features (to allow admins to lock processes to certain GPU’s, a necessary feature in queue-driven clusters) as well as support for 64-bit memory addressing which opens up the 6GB memory available on the Quadro 6000.

In addition, they’ve just announced the new version of Parallel NSight, v1.5, that includes compatibility with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.  The new version offers a new “Dual GPU” mode that enables the Compute Debugger on a system with 2 suitable GPU’s, previously a feature reserved only for network debugging or the Multi-OS SLI systems.  It adds support for the new Fermi Hardware (GTS460 and such), and all of the features of CUDA3.2.

For those of you in the GPU compute space, however, the big news may be the new ‘TCC’ Driver.  For a while now, Nvidia has offered a special ‘Tesla Compute Cluster’ driver that enables CUDA and GPU support without dragging in the Windows Display Subsystems.  While initially intended to overcome some problems with Window’s strange requirements for hardware access when using Remote Desktop and in cluster systems like HPCServer, the driver loads the Tesla card (or Quadro card, if you really want to) not as a display device, but as an additional compute card installed in the system.  While not intended, Nvidia found some interesting side-effects in how Windows deals with it.  When working with the  Windows Display systems and the WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model), you are required to bundle all of your kernels together before you load them to the card, each kernel taking approximately 30 microseconds.   If you, instead, go through the Windows Driver Model (WDM) then you can load kernels when convenient, and it only takes approximately 2.5 microseconds.  That means a complex situation requiring 10 compute kernels:

• WDDM: 30 microseconds * 10 kernels = 300 microseconds
• WDM: 2.5 microseconds * 10 kernels = 25 microseconds.

For people doing very heavy GPU computation, this adds up fast.  However, users found themselves having to make a choice:  Load up the TCC driver and lose all display support, or load up the display driver and deal with the slightly degraded performance.

No more, as the new driver enables a run-time switch that can toggle between Display mode and TCC mode.  Now you can take your dual Quadro system and run in graphics SLI mode for superior performance, then switch one of your Quadros to TCC mode and run your compute codes faster.  Granted, it’s not a situation many people find themselves in but for the few that do: It’s a welcome change.

Parallel NSight will be available next week (at GTC conveniently) on September 22nd.

Full release after the break.

Read more…

Science cuda, nsight, nvidia

Wind power is becoming more and more a good alternative to traditional energy sources like coal or oil, and designer Mike Solita made a nice graphic about it. Flowtown revealed some interesting stats about the mobile phone use by adults in America, and to finish today’s selection, three infographics about the video game industry: the evolution of video game controls and the PC vs Consoles breakdown, both by Renters, and the Playstation’s 15 years anniversary infographic, by Kotaku.

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Graphics, Science design, economy, environment, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations

Secondhand Smoke Drops, Number of Smokers Stays Steady

Infographic: Just how Massive Is Google anyway?

Graphics, Science digest, infographics, list

Over at LearnCentral, it seems they’ll be hosting an online webinar later this week on infographics and information retention.

Join Jane Krauss, coauthor of Reinventing Project-Based Learning for a look into Infographics and how viewing and making them builds core knowledge and information literacy. This will be a very visual and lively session where you’ll get to interpret compelling infographics and imagine setting up situations where your students create their own.

The webinar is set for Thursday September 16th at 5pm Pacific.  Sign up at their site.

via PBL and Information Literacy through Infographics | LearnCentral.

Science online, webinar

The 3DreamTeam Company has just announced a beta test of Vizerra, a software platform for creating and viewing interactive 3D environments.  You can hit their website and (if you’re a Windows User) download several famous environments including Angkor Wat, Mount Vernon, and St Peter’s Square.

3DreamTeam has utilized the Vizerra platform to produce twenty 3D environments (most of them listed as UNESCO World heritage sites), more than forty major 3D virtual construction solutions, virtual museum exhibitions and product simulations for clients across Europe, Russia and the USA.

But that’s not all.  They’ve having a competition where you simply find 3D Vision items hidden in the virtual environments and have a chance to win a GeForce 460, a GTX260, or 3D Vision Glasses.

Full press release after the break.

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Graphics 3d, contest, vizerra

Tiago Veloso’s latest contribution on InspiredMag is a collection of visualizations of the growth of Google and their various properties (YouTube) to world dominating proportions.

September 15, 1997. That was the day Larry Page and Sergey Brin officially registered the domain google.com, and the internet was never the same.

Because true inspiration – and innovation – can really transform the World, today we bring a selection of data-visualizations that show how Google stepped up to be the giant that we all know today. I also recommend a visit at Wikipedia’s article for a more “text” version of this incredible path.

via Google This – 13 Years of World Domination Visualized | Inspired Magazine.

Graphics google, infographics, list

Stephen David Beck and Thomas Sterling, professors at LSU, have received $1 Million of federal grant money for their “Center for Digital Innovation” proposal, which will further research into next-generation digital media and supercomputing architectures.  On the media side, it will be used in the AVATAR Initiative (Arts, Visualization, Advanced Technologies and Research) to create an academic research program specializing in digital media, animation, video games, music, and digital art.  On the supercomputing side, they’ll be working with various DARPA groups to develop execution models, APIs, and system software for Exascale Computing.

“With the additional funding our proposal has received through federal appropriations, we’re able to advance the research initiatives already taking place on campus and catalyze efforts within the digital media group and the supercomputer architecture group to expand work in both areas and create new opportunities,” Beck said.

A big win for LSU, although $1 Million really is a paltry sum for what could be “the future of supercomputing technology”.  It’s also an odd mix of work, Digital Media and Supercomputing.  I believe it was a political decision, to improve their odds of winning the grant.

I’ll be attending a presentation by Dr Sterling tomorrow on Exascale Computing, so maybe I’ll hear some details about what he plans to do with his share of the grant.

Full release after the break.

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Science grant, lsu