Home » Archives for September 2010
About four years ago I bought a new 37″ 720p LCD HDTV. It fits in our TV cabinet just fine, and with a coat hanger antenna, pulls in the Saints just great in high definition. (That is not my antenna; he just tells you how to build it.) I really do not have a need for 3-D content. Sure it is cool, but I do not want to go out and buy another TV just to get 3-D. Apparently, I am not alone. What do you think?
According to the international accounting and consulting firm, 83 percent of consumers say that 3D isn’t enough to make them want to buy a new television. Moreover, 60 percent of respondents said they simply aren’t willing to pay extra for a television with 3D capabilities. Just 21 percent of those surveyed said they would pay 10 percent more for a 3D television over a set that doesn’t have the technology.
via : Survey: Most won’t buy new TV just to get 3D @ CNET
Hardware 3d, hdtv
Many people don’t realize just how much data goes into finding the next big oil field. They spend millions scouring the globe and running seismic surveys to find what’s under our feet, and then spend days, weeks, even months to analyze the surveys to find something useful. Take this example:
For example, the average ship running seismic gear has between 20,000 and 25,000 sensors on board, and you typically use several ships in concert to survey an area. This will yield anywhere from 50 to 200TB of data per run and take five to seven days of solid processing on a large number of systems to get results. If you ramp up the resolution, it can take 15,000-20,000 compute nodes running days or weeks to complete the job.
Here at GTC in the “Oil & Gas” track, they had a presentations discussing how they have had success integrating GPUs into their workflow to great effect. They’ve come up with a 5-fold increase in performance, resulting in a 6-fold decrease in overall cost, just by porting their already embarrassingly parallel codes to CUDA.
via GPUs slick up with oil sleuths • The Register.
Science cuda, gpu, gtc, oil&gas
Optima has recently announced the availability of a new product called the 3D-XL adapter. The 3D-XL will allow legacy 720p DLP video projectors to play 3-D images for 1080p sources, such as a 3-D BluRay player. Apparently this will only work if the legacy 720p projector comes with HDMI 1.3 inputs.
Model 3D-XL ($399 suggested retail) is billed as the first converter box that lets 720p 3D DLP projectors play 1080p 3D Blu-ray discs. As with all single projector 3D systems, active 3D glasses are required to view images in 3D.
via : Optoma Unveils 3D Adapter For 720p Projectors @ Twice.com
Hardware
To the right is an image captured from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope. The image shows the reflection nebula DG 129, which is located approximately 500 light years away from Earth. As its name implies, a reflection nebula reflects the light from nearby stars.
The WISE space-born telescope has a 16 inch diameter and surveys light in the infrared wavelengths. The telescope is running out of the frozen coolant needed to keep it cool it to view the universe in the infrared wavelength. Currently the longest-wavelength infrared sensor on WISE has stopped producing useful data.
Gripped in the claw of the constellation Scorpius, sits the reflection nebula DG 129, a cloud of gas and dust that reflects light from nearby, bright stars. This infrared view of the nebula was captured by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.
Viewed in visible light, this portion of the sky seems somewhat unremarkable. But in infrared light, a lovely reflection nebula is revealed. DG 129 was first catalogued by a pair of German astronomers, named Johann Dorschner and Josef Gürtler, in 1963.
Much like gazing at Earth-bound clouds, it is fun to use your imagination when looking at images of nebulae. Some people see this nebula as an arm and hand emerging from the cosmos. If you picture the “thumb” and “forefinger” making a circle, it is as though you are seeing a celestial “okay” sign.
The bright star on the right with the greenish haze is Pi Scorpii. This star marks one of the claws of the scorpion in the constellation Scorpius. It is actually a triple-star system located some 500 light-years away. Perhaps a cross-species celestial handshake is imminent?
The colors used in this image represent different wavelengths of infrared light. The image was constructed from frames taken after WISE ran out of some of the coolant needed to chill its infrared detectors and began to warm up. The WISE detector sensitive to 22-micron light has become too warm to produce good images, but the three shorter wavelength detectors continue to crank out over 7,000 pictures of the sky every day, like the ones that make up this picture .Blue represents infrared radiation at 3.4 microns, while green represents light with a wavelength of 4.6 microns. Red represents 12-micron infrared light.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team
via : Reflection Nebula DG 129 and Pi Scorpii
Science astronomy, nasa, wise
In the beginning, there was the iPad. Now, as we can see in Finer Hosting‘s comparison chart, more and more players are entering the tablet market. From Cellphones.org comes the joys and pains of texting, and Anansi shows us the Australian Mobile internet usage, as well as the main Social networks used. The ideological differences in the UK parties are well illustrated in political blog Left Foot Forward design, and the last selected infographic for today goes to Caring‘s breakdown of Alzheimer Disease.
Read more…
Graphics, Science design, economy, environment, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations
Solving the Nurse Shortage Crisis
Graphics, Science digest, infographics, list
Earlier this week, NVidia and NextIO announced that NextIO is taking over the Tesla S-series product. If you’re not familiar with the S-Series Tesla, it’s the rack-mount product that carries 4 Tesla cards in a 1U chassis, used by several GPU-computing clusters. It uses a small half-height PCIe Expansion card to connect to the external box, and allows you to put GPU compute capability in the popular CPU-dense cluster designs from the major manufacturers. NextIO will be taking over the product and they’re using Nvidia’s existing supply chain and their own, and they’ve rebranded it the “vCORE Express”. They’re here at GTC talking about the product, their plans, and showing off some of their other options.
NextIO is known in the industry for their impressive PCI expansion and virtualization technology. You can read my SC09 report, but to sum it up, their appliances enable:
- Connecting multiple PCIe devices up to multiple servers,
- Assigning any combination of these devices to any combination of the servers.
- Device virtualization for SR-IOV and MR-IOV devices (mainly Network interfaces)
- Hot-swap capability for any PCIe Device
- Full GUI & commandline control of everything.
It’s a great device for large datacenters that can solve many of the power, heating, and reliability issues of things like GPUs and Network interfaces by putting them all in a separate unit, making it easier to maintain and reducing downtime. Imagine if the next time you lost a network interface or fried a GPU, you didn’t have to reboot the node to replace it?
So here at GTC, they’ve announced the vCORE Express product. Currently, it’s an exact copy of the existing NVidia Tesla-S series product, offering 4 Tesla cards in a 1U Chassis connected to 2 servers. Currently, it offers none of the “secret sauce” that makes NextIO attractive, but that’s a temporary situation. NextIO is already looking to add more to the device, but what’s even better is the upcoming “vCORE Extreme” product.
Read more…
Hardware feature, nextio
I wasn’t able to make it to this morning’s keynote delivered by computational biologist Dr Klaus Schulten, but CGSociety made it and has a short writeup of his talk.
“The GPU provides microscopic views that are not available otherwise,” added Schulten. “Our microscopes are not glass and brass tubes. Instead they are mathematical formulae, Physics, software and hardware.”
Hopefully NVidia will have it online for viewing soon.
via CGSociety – NVIDIA Day Two Keynote.
Science biomed, gtc
A bit more information on the upcoming PGI CUDA x86 C compiler is over at GPU Science, including some important details like:
- It’s a C compiler, to complement their existing CUDA Fortran offerings.
- Works with AMD and Intel CPUs
- Utilizes SIMD streaming capabilities
And does it all at run-time, meaning a single universal binary can run with or without a CUDA-compliant GPU. See Update Below.
“CUDA C for x86 is a perfect complement to CUDA Fortran and PGI’s optimizing parallel Fortran and C compilers for multi-core x86,” said Douglas Miles, director, The Portland Group. “It’s another important element in our on-going strategy of providing HPC programmers with development tools that give PGI users a full range of options for optimizing compute-intensive applications, while allowing them to leverage the latest technical innovations from AMD, Intel and NVIDIA.”
Seems they’ll have it at the SC10 exhibit, but there are no details yet on availability or pricing.
Update 9/23 1pm: I just spoke with NVidia’s Sumit Gupta and found out I was mistaken on this. The PGI compiler will be a CPU-only compiler, turning CUDA instructions into CPU-executing code. The benefit being that people new to HPC and parallel algorithms can use the breadth of information on CUDA, which is far simpler than most other models, to write their code and run it right on CPU’s. For those people who already have GPU-based systems, they’ll be able to recompile for CPU-only without any modification of their code, and enable use of possibly underutilized CPU-only clusters.
via PGI to Demonstrate New PGI CUDA C Compiler at SC10 Supercomputing | GPU Science.
Science cuda, nvidia, pgi, sc10
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