VizWorld.com

Following yesterday’s post about data breaches at a corporate level, we start our selection today with Wikibon‘s explanation of the different levels of Information Technology Security, followed by a look at some of the major threats to customer data online, with an infographic by MDI. After that, Credit Score makes an interesting overview about Corporate Espionage, and finally, from Oh My Gov and Symantec, the Growing Cyber Threats that the Governments and Infrastructure providers are facing. And it’s scary, to say the least…

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

Over at SolidSmack, they’ve got the latest press release and details on the newest Luxion Keyshot feature: Animation support.

KeyShot 3 delivers an all new, patent-pending animation system making product and camera animations easier than ever before. In addition, KeyShot 3 delivers significant improvements to user interface and workflow with improved asset management and part interaction. KeyShot’s import pipeline has been significantly expanded to now support Parasolid®-based file formats such as NX, Solid Edge and SolidWorks on both PC and Mac and also includes over 400 new materials and over 40 new lighting environments.

It’s available as a $500 addon to the existing KeyShot, and features the same simple interface they’ve done so well with in still imagery.  Definitely go read the release if you’re a KeyShot user.

via Luxion Drops KeyShot 3 Bomb, Animators Rejoice – SolidSmack.com.

Graphics keyshot, luxion

If Identity Theft is one of the biggest security issues in the Digital Age, like we saw yesterday, corporate data breaches have a huge impact as well, for obvious reasons. So, today’s Daily Viz from Visual Loop is dedicated to review some of the most high-profile data breaches ever, including the recent Lulzsec’s hacks, and the cost of security breaches in Healthcare. Infographics provided by Focus, Flowing Data, Documents Management System, Dell and Gadgets & Gizmos.

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

Identity Theft is one of the most troubling and recorrente forms of cybercrime, and the infographics made by Credit Score, Mozbot, Credit Repair, Credit Loan and Online MBA show some stats, facts and important tips to avoid becoming a victim. I must say, I was amazed by some of the numbers presented here, maybe because it’s that kind of situation you think it will never happen to you. Until it does.

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

Big news from Nvidia today as their new “Maximus” system comes to light.  First announced back at SIGGRAPH, it’s now available for public use.  If you’ve ever found yourself wanting to do both GPU compute and rendering at the same time (Possibly using PhysX simulations with high-end rendering, or running GPU-accelerated CFD simulations combined with visualization) and found yourself dealing with complex driver configurations or dark incantations of system configurations to get it all to work, then Maximus is exactly the system you’ve been looking for.

“To those of us who have spent their careers focused on workstations, NVIDIA Maximus represents a revolution,” said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions Group, NVIDIA. “Previous workstation architectures forced designers and engineers to do compute-intensive work and graphics- intensive work serially and often offline. They can now do them at the same time, on the same machine, allowing professionals to explore more ideas faster and converge quickly on the best possible answers.”

Done entirely in the driver, you can now buy a good graphics-card (Fermi-based NVidia Quadro, all the way down to the $200 Quadro 600) and match it with a nice NVidia Tesla card and let the driver map your processes entirely.  Right now the matching is a bit naive, putting CUDA/OpenCL processes on the Tesla and DirectX/OpenGL processes on the Quadro, but that alone can offer a huge boost in performance by allowing both rendering and compute processes to operate in parallel at maximum power.

The system is already tested and approved for an impressive list of engineering & CAD tools like ANSYS, CATIA, and MATLAB, along with other tools like Adobe Premiere and Bunkspeed.  For most of these tools, they’ve already got great GPU-accelerated compute aspects, and GPU-accelerated rendering features.  Unfortunately, it’s almost always been either/or and never both at the same time.  With the new Maximus drivers you can run both aspects at full-speed, without special configuration or dealing with special software settings.

They’ve also got a great list of OEM Hardware partners offering full support for hardware and software, all on day 1.    Another great feature is their new adaptive power consumption. It’s no secret that NVidia cards can be tough on a power supply, and adding two to a machine can be a real strain. With the new Maximus system, you (or the Hardware OEM provider) can specify voltage limits, preventing the cards from drawing too much power and burning out your power supply.

It’s a complete package all-around.  Get the full press release, along with some great demonstration videos of Maximus in action, after the break.

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Hardware driver, maximus, nvidia

This week we continue to select some of the best and most recent infographics about internet safety and computer threats, covering aspects like cybercrime, password strenght, online scams and fraus and data breaches. And a good way to start is the Norton 2011 Cybercrime Report, followed the perils of the internet, from Intac, Online Schools‘s infographic about computer threats, and a look at the safest and most dangerous places in the world to use the Internet, and in the U.S, presented by AVG and U.S. Infrastructure.

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

The current issue of Popular Science, the November 2011 issue, is all about the incredible quantities and capabilities of data and visualization.  With several articles from big names like Seth Loyd, and visualizations from guys like Jan Willem Tulp and Jer Thorp, it’s sure to be a winner.

November 2011: Data Is Power | Popular Science.

Graphics, Science infographic, magazine, popular science, visualization

We showed in the two previous posts the extension of Privacy issues with Facebook, but, like we said already, this is far from being a “Zuckerberg exclusive”. Today, to close this week of Daily Viz from Visual Loop, Veracode, Focus and Zone Alarm take a look at what’s happening with Google, who’s also very well-known for its is privacy issues, and Secure List and again Veracode show us  some of the security problems threatening Twitter users.

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

This is a bit off-topic for us here at VizWorld, but interesting nonetheless.  CogniMem will be launching and demonstrating their new “CogniBlox” module at SC11, an FPGA-based stackable module targeted at large “pattern recognition” tasks.  It’s effectively a specialized neural-network processing system that offers about 4000 “neurons” per block, and the blocks can be stacked in all 3 dimensions for surprising density.  It’s an excellent candidate for the first exascale computing systems, but will be highly specialized in what it can do.  This makes it similar to the early MDGRAPE system, which hit 1 Petaflop well before other general-purpose computers, but was specialized and not capable of running LINPACK (thus making it ineligible for the Top500).

“CogniBlox architecture is based on multiple CM1K (1024 neuron) components allowing for constant parallel matching of vectors in 10 microseconds regardless of the number of vectors being compared at the same time,” said Bruce McCormick, co-founder, president and CEO of CogniMem.  “Recent announcements from IBM about its DARPA SyNAPSE project have rekindled interest in this exciting technology.  Based on multiple generations of IBM patented ZISC technology, we have perfected this approach for practical commercial use, providing unmatched performance at low power, and made it available now.”

With this making Exascale feasible, one has to wonder if such special-purpose machines may open the door to more mainstream general-purpose machines soon.  You could almost argue that NVidia’s development in the Tesla space could be a step towards bridging the cap (putting special-purpose hardware alongside general-purpose hardware).

Get the full press release after the break.

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Hardware, Science cognimem, hpc

With SC11 on the horizon, you can expect many more such announcements, but today China and NVidia are excited about the use of 2,200 Nvidia Tesla cards to run the first ever computer simulation of a complete H1N1 flu virus at atomic levels.

The CAS-IPE researchers made the simulation breakthrough by developing a molecular dynamics simulation application that takes advantage of GPU acceleration2. It was run on the Mole-8.5 GPU supercomputer, which is comprised of 288 server nodes. The system was able to simulate 770 picoseconds per day with an integration time step of 1 femtosecond for 300 million atoms or radicals1.

via Chinese Researchers Tap GPU Supercomputer for World’s First Simulation of Complete H1N1 Virus – NVIDIA Newsroom.

Hardware, Science hpc, molecular, nvidia