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Just in case you are not able to go to the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia has kindly posted a recap for you of Day 1.

Hardware nvidia

A spectacular new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the heart of the Lagoon Nebula. Seen as a massive cloud of glowing dust and gas, bombarded by the energetic radiation of new stars, this placid name hides a dramatic reality.

The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured a dramatic view of gas and dust sculpted by intense radiation from hot young stars deep in the heart of the Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8). This spectacular object is named after the wide, lagoon-shaped dust lane that crosses the glowing gas of the nebula.

This structure is prominent in wide-field images, but cannot be seen in this close-up. However the strange billowing shapes and sandy texture visible in this image make the Lagoon Nebula’s watery name eerily appropriate from this viewpoint too.

Located four to five thousand light-years away, in the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer), Messier 8 is a huge region of star birth that stretches across one hundred light-years. Clouds of hydrogen gas are slowly collapsing to form new stars, whose bright ultraviolet rays then light up the surrounding gas in a distinctive shade of red.

The wispy tendrils and beach-like features of the nebula are not caused by the ebb and flow of tides, but rather by ultraviolet radiation’s ability to erode and disperse the gas and dust into the distinctive shapes that we see.

In recent years astronomers probing the secrets of the Lagoon Nebula have found the first unambiguous proof that star formation by accretion of matter from the gas cloud is ongoing in this region.

Young stars that are still surrounded by an accretion disc occasionally shoot out long tendrils of matter from their poles. Several examples of these jets, known as Herbig-Haro objects, have been found in this nebula in the last five years, providing strong support for astronomers’ theories about star formation in such hydrogen-rich regions.

The Lagoon Nebula is faintly visible to the naked eye on dark nights as a small patch of grey in the heart of the Milky Way. Without a telescope, the nebula looks underwhelming because human eyes are unable to distinguish clearly between colours at low light levels.

Charles Messier, the 18th century French astronomer, observed the nebula and included it in his famous astronomical catalogue, from which the nebula’s alternative name comes. But his relatively small refracting telescope would only have hinted at the dramatic structures and colours now visible thanks to Hubble.
Notes

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.

Image credit: NASA, ESA

via : Breaking Waves in the Stellar Lagoon

Science astronomy, hubble, nasa

Solving the Nurse Shortage Crisis | Veterinary Technician.

infographics

Yesterday Randall posted on the Nvidia product roadmap. Let’s take a little bit deeper look at the new GPU chips that were announced. However, before we do that, let’s also take a look at the latest GPU chip to help estimate what we could see in these future chips.

Tesla was named about Nikola Tesla. Fermi was named after the physicist Enrico Fermi. We know a lot about the Fermi GPU since it is publicly available. Fermi has 3.0 billion transistors, and is manufactured by TSMC in a 40 nm process. The Tesla C2050 / C2070 GPU Computing Processor can do 515.2 GFlops and consumes about 247 watts of power. The only difference between the C2050 and the C2070 is the amount of memory. The C2050 has 3 GB and the C2070 has 6 GB. That makes the GFlops per watt ratio for the C2070 to be approximately 2.0, and the C2050 to be approximately 2.16. Taking a look at the chart, the C2070 coincides with the top line of the Fermi chip.

The next GPU from Nvidia is code named Kepler, which is named for the mathematician Johannes Kepler. Kepler will be released sometime in 2011, and will be manufactured on a 28nm process. If the top of the chip is the correct value, then Nvidia is estimating that the double-precision Gigaflops performance of 5.7 GFlops per watt. Using 250 watts to represent the maximum amount of electrical power that Nvidia can use, then the Kepler C3070 will be able to compute at 1.425 Tflops in double precision. Yes, I made up the name C3070. I just followed Nvidia’s standard naming convention, which will likely change. That makes Kepler about 2.7 times faster than the Fermi C2070.

The follow-on GPU to Kepler will be the Maxwell which is named for the mathematician James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell will be released sometime in 2013, and will be manufactured on a 22nm process. If the top of the chip is the correct value, then Nvidia is estimating that the double-precision Gigaflops performance of 15.7 GFlops per watt. Using 250 watts to represent the maximum amount of electrical power that Nvidia can use, then the Maxwell C4070 will be able to compute at 3.925 Tflops in double precision. Again, I made up the name C4070. That makes Maxwell about 7.6 times faster than the Fermi C2070.

Let us further suppose that we want to know how much computing this would give us in a rack, and use that to build a high performance computer.

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Hardware feature, kepler, maxwell, nvidia

Whether you’re at GTC this week or not, you’ve no doubt heard the amazing claims of performance boosts possible with using not just CUDA, but any GPU-acceleration system.  However, you can’t just recompile your code and expect massive boosts, you have to dig deep and invest the time and tools to completely rebuild your algorithms for maximum parallelism and concurrency.  This week’s recommended resource is a guide to help you do just that: Clay Breshears’ “The Art of Concurrency“.

If you’re looking to take full advantage of multi-core processors with concurrent programming, this practical book provides the knowledge and hands-on experience you need. The Art of Concurrency is one of the few resources to focus on implementing algorithms in the shared-memory model of multi-core processors, rather than just theoretical models or distributed-memory architectures. The book provides detailed explanations and usable samples to help you transform algorithms from serial to parallel code, along with advice and analysis for avoiding mistakes that programmers typically make when first attempting these computations.

Written by an Intel engineer with over two decades of parallel and concurrent programming experience, this book will help you:

• Understand parallelism and concurrency
• Explore differences between programming for shared-memory and distributed-memory
• Learn guidelines for designing multithreaded applications, including testing and tuning
• Discover how to make best use of different threading libraries, including Windows threads, POSIX threads, OpenMP, and Intel Threading Building Blocks
• Explore how to implement concurrent algorithms that involve sorting, searching, graphs, and other practical computations

The Art of Concurrency shows you how to keep algorithms scalable to take advantage of new processors with even more cores. For developing parallel code algorithms for concurrent programming, this book is a must.

Of course, if you already know everything there is to know about Parallel Algorithms but just need a refresher on CUDA, you can’t go wrong with the last Recommended Resource: CUDA By Example.

This book and many others is available in the Vizworld Store.

Science feature, resource of the week

Hasselblad currently manufactures the 60-megapixel HD4-60 camera. As if that is not large enough, they recently announced that they they would be making a camera capable of capturing even larger images for 2011. CNET News is reporting that this camera will be capable of 200 million pixels.

Who would ever need a 200-megapixel camera? Well, lots of people I would expect. For one thing, astronomers could certainly use images that size. However, the way that they get to 200 megapixels probably rules out astronomy. Instead it looks like it will be used for advertisements used in print medium.

However, even in the rarefied air of the medium-format market, where image sensors are very large and very expensive, the 200-megapixel “extended multishot” technology won’t appeal to everyone: each shot will take about 30 seconds to capture, restricting the camera to stationary subjects such as cars, watches, and jewelry.

That’s because of the design of the Hasselblad multishot-series cameras such as the HD4-50MS. The current model uses tiny piezoelectric motors to shift the sensor a very small amount to combine two shots into one higher-quality image.

via Hasselblad plans 200-megapixel camera for 2011 @ CNET News

Hardware camera

Over at Stereoscopy News they’ve published the 10 Commandments of Stereoscopy, providing a good baseline of what NOT to do in 3D Cinematography.

This text was elaborated by the StereoscopyNews editor back in 1994, then revised and edited several times, the last one in 2010 after several stereographers were consulted, and consecutively exchanged contradictory opinions. We hope the text reflects the middle-of-the-road vision of what to do and what not to do when shooting 3D.

Look it over, and what do you think?  Leave anything out?

via “The Ten Commandments of Stereoscopy.

Graphics 3d, stereoscopic

Guru3D has put up a post about Zotac’s new GeForce GTX 460 graphics card. With this graphics card, you can display up to four simultaneous displays using the three DisplayPort connectors, and the one dual-link DVI connector. From the quote below, it does not look like the three DisplayPort connectors support anything over 1600×1200, or else someone is doing the math wrong. Even with only 3 monitors, I am not certain the the Nvidia 460 is up to some heavy gaming at that resolution.

The card is capable of driving up to four independent displays simultaneously with a combined resolution up to 6400×1200.Three DisplayPort connectors enable the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 460 3DP to support resolutions up to 4800×1200 across three independent displays for true spanned triple-monitor computing. A dual-link DVI output enables connectivity to extreme high-definition displays with the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 460 3DP for connectivity to a single monitor at resolutions up to 2560×1600 for users without DisplayPort capable displays.

via Zotac Quadruple-display capable graphics card @ Guru3D

Hardware nvidia

Andrew Bond, Vice President of Engineering for Havok, introduces some of Havok’s cloth and destruction physics effects, prior to announcing the free availability of the Havok SDK for AppUp games developers.

Graphics havok, intel

Peak oil. Something that has been a concern way before the BP disaster. Car Rentals helps us visualize how much oil is left, with lots of interesting stats. From The Big Wild comes an illustration of the World’s biggest rives, and the folks at Mint look at the the Garbage Economy – and there’s a lot of money there! Finally, an well-design infographic by Density Design about the truth behind the fresh vegetables we buy at large supermarkets, and the effects on economy, and GOOD‘s breakdown of the value of an Hour of Work in different countries.

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