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General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is very popular right now, and NVIDIA has the lead in this arena with their Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). While in the future, it looks like people will be moving from CUDA, which is proprietary to NVIDIA, to OpenCL, which should be available from a variety of vendors.

Morgan Kaufmann has published a new book in the GPU Computing Gems series. As to be expected, this book covers a variety of topics including scientific simulation, life sciences, statistical modeling, ray tracing, rendering, computer vision, video processing, signal processing, and medical imaging. You can buy GPU Computing Gems from Amazon for $59.24.

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are designed to be parallel – having hundreds of cores versus traditional CPUs. Increasingly, you can leverage GPU power for many computationally-intense applications, not just for graphics. If you’re facing the challenge of programming systems to effectively use these massively parallel processors to achieve efficiency and performance goals, GPU Computing Gems provides a wealth of tested, proven GPU techniques.

GPU Computing Gems: Emerald Edition is the first volume in this new series from Morgan Kaufmann. Different application domains often pose similar algorithm problems, and researchers from diverse application domains often develop similar algorithmic strategies.

via : Wen-Mei Hwu Polishes Book of GPU Computing Gems @ InsideHPC
via : GPU Computing Gems

Graphics book

To the right is the final image captured from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope. The WISE space-born telescope has a 16 inch diameter and surveys light in the infrared wavelengths. The telescope ran out of the frozen coolant needed to keep it cool it to view the universe in the infrared wavelength. We have covered this space telescope from its first images up until this last image. Thanks NASA, for the beautiful images from the WISE telescope.

On the morning of February 1st, 2011, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, took its last snapshot of the sky. This “last light” image is reminiscent of the “first light” image from WISE, taken only 13 months prior. WISE’s final picture shows thousands of stars in a patch of the Milky Way Galaxy, covering an area 3 times the size of the full Moon, in the constellation Perseus. In the upper left corner, a faint wispy cloud can be seen bending around a pulsating variable star called EV Persei.

After its coolant ran out in October of 2010, WISE warmed up from -260 degrees to -200 degrees C (-436 to -328 degrees Fahrenheit). This image contains data from the two detectors largely unaffected by the warm-up: 3.4 and 4.6 microns (the 12 and 22 micron detectors are no longer useful at the warmer temperatures). The color is representational: cyan (blue-green) shows light detected by the 3.4 micron channel of WISE, and red shows light seen by the 4.6 micron channel. This region of the sky had been observed by WISE previously in all four of its detectors as part of its primary survey, and it is hard to see any difference in the quality of the last-light images at 3.4 and 4.6 microns.

In the short 13 months that WISE surveyed, it produced millions of infrared images covering the whole sky in its four bands, and covering it twice at 3.4 and 4.6 microns. Now that the survey is complete, WISE is being put into hibernation. While the satellite sleeps and circles more than 500 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, the WISE team is busily preparing its data for two big public releases: one this April, and the final release in the spring of 2012. Even though WISE has taken its last picture, the project will continue to feature some of the best imagery from the survey on a regular basis.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team

via : Last Light

Science astronomy, nasa, wise

Blunty was able to get some hands-on time playing with the Nintendo 3DS. Unfortunately, he was only able to show video of it in 2-D mode. Why? Because Nintendo asked him to, of course. Showing it in 3-D mode would look weird since he is shooting the video with a 2-D camera, and we are watching on 2-D YouTube. Still, it is an interesting review, even if we cannot see it in 3-D.

Going hands-on with the Nintendo 3DS, which will be releasing soon, for a first impressions review of the hardware, the built in software, and even trying the backwards compatibility with Pokemon on 3DS

Blunty3000 gets some play time with the as yet unreleased successor to the DS, the 3DS.
Playing with the built in software including the Mii maker, some Augmented reality gaming using an AR card, Face Raiders using the cameras and the motion sensors, and even popping a DS game into the 3DS, Pokemon to see how the backwards compatibility does.

via : Nintendo 3DS – Hands On‬ (+ playing Pokemon on 3DS)

Hardware 3d, nintendo 3ds

At the Mobile World Congress 2011 conference in Barcelona, Spain, LG announced their LG Optimus Pad, and the LG Optimus 3D smartphone. The tablet comes with a 5 Megapixel, 3-D capable camera which will allow you to capture either images or video in 3-D. Unfortunately, the tablet is not 3-D capable, unless you count wearing the red/cyan glasses (which I do not count). Instead you will have to watch the content on a 3-D capable TV or PC.

The smartphone also includes a 3-D capable camera. Again, it is a 5 Megapixel camera capable of recording 1080p in 2-D mode, and 720p in 3-D mode. Unlike the tablet, however, it will be capable of switching between 2-D mode and 3-D mode on the display of the phone itself

The 3D Vision Blog has more information on both the table and smartphone announcement.

The phone also features an HDMI 1.4 output that will allow you to play stereoscopic 3D content trough it on a 3D HDTV for example. The phone will also come with a YouTube 3D client that will allow the users to upload the 3D videos they capture directly on YouTube in 3D format thanks to a partnership between LG and Google. The Android-powered Optimus 3D will be available in the second quarter of 2011.

via : The LG Optimus Pad Tablet and LG Optimus 3D Smartphone @ 3D Vision Blog

Hardware 3d, lg

Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI) is a wireless standard that allows uncompressed delivery of high-definition video. This would allow a person to have a personal computer in one room with e WHDI capable graphics card, and allow it to stream a movie to a WHDI enabled HDTV in another room. We have talked about WHDI before, and even included a review of it from PC Perspective. Today, Guru3D brings you another review of the KFA2 GTX 460 WDHI graphics card. What did they think of WHDI?

WHDI in the sense of the wireless signal works pretty darn well. Advertised you get 100 Ft / 33 Meters at your disposal to work with. Now we can’t 100% concur how exact that figure is, as a lot of the distance available to you will depend on how cluttered your 5 GHz band is. For example if your neighbors all love and use Wireless N routers, that might hinder the signal.

However, we have a 5G enabled router as well, and our network is cluttered and smeared with wireless signals yet that did not stop this solution to break through one concrete iron bar enforced floor and a distance of roughly 10 meters. In this environment we had a flawless signal.

Impressive stuff. I like the sheer innovation and technology here.

via : Wireless Graphics card – KFA2 GTX 460 WDHI review

Hardware graphics card, nvidia, whdi

Now this is a cool touchscreen! I could see this being used in an actual class instead of just as a tour stop.

This is the curved screen in our reality center of the University of Groningen. We just finished building our own touch detection for it. We used six Optitrack v120 slim camera’s which have a good sensitivity for infrared light. We used 16 cheap infrared emitters (the kind used for security systems) with a total of 1000 LED’s.

The touch detection software runs on three old computers each with two camera’s connected. One extra computer combines the output from the detection computers and send event data to our main visualization system.
This way we have (even using the old computers) enough processing power to be able to run the detection software at 60Hz and with a latency between 30 ms and 50 ms. It can detect without any problem 100 different touches at any time (more is possible, but it becomes slower)

We used a modified version of Community Core Vision (CCV) 1.4 (nuigroup.com) (modified so it can do two camera’s on one computer). The communication protocol is preferable TUIO (tuio.org) and we did install Multi-touch Vista (multitouchvista.codeplex.com), which translates TUIO events to WM_TOUCH events for windows 7. The demos you see in the video are from Multitouch for Java.

The curved screen itself is consist of a 3 mm dark acrylic layer, coated with a diffuser on the front. Illumination is from behind using six full HD projectors. The cameras and the IR-leds are also located behind the screen.

via : Reality Touch Theatre

Hardware touchscreen

This is a fun way to generate a quick infographic that actually means something. BillShrink has an interactive application that allows you enter your birth year, then generates how much something cost when you were born versus today. You can see what it generated for me above. The numbers look about right, except for the yearly income, which looks a bit low.

Do you know how much an average house sold for in the year you were born? What about the price of a pound of steak? Use this interactive graphic to discover how much inflation has effected prices since your birth year.

via : Birth Year Inflation @ BillShrink

Graphics interactive infographic

NGC 3621 is a spiral galaxy about 22 million light-years away in the constellation of Hydra (The Sea Snake). It is comparatively bright and can be seen well in moderate-sized telescopes. This picture was taken using the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The data were selected from the ESO archive by Joe DePasquale as part of the Hidden Treasures competition. Joe’s picture of NGC 3621 was ranked fourth in the competition.

This galaxy has a flat pancake shape, indicating that it hasn’t yet come face to face with another galaxy as such a galactic collision would have disturbed the thin disc of stars, creating a small bulge in its centre. Most astronomers think that galaxies grow by merging with other galaxies, in a process called hierarchical galaxy formation. Over time, this should create large bulges in the centres of spirals. Recent research, however, has suggested that bulgeless, or pure-disc, spiral galaxies like NGC 3621 are actually fairly common.

This galaxy is of further interest to astronomers because its relative proximity allows them to study a wide range of astronomical objects within it, including stellar nurseries, dust clouds, and pulsating stars called Cepheid variables, which astronomers use as distance markers in the Universe. In the late 1990s, NGC 3621 was one of 18 galaxies selected for a Key Project of the Hubble Space Telescope: to observe Cepheid variables and measure the rate of expansion of the Universe to a higher accuracy than had been possible before. In the successful project, 69 Cepheid variables were observed in this galaxy alone.

Multiple monochrome images taken through four different colour filters were combined to make this picture. Images taken through a blue filter have been coloured blue in the final picture, images through a yellow-green filter are shown as green and images through a red filter as dark orange. In addition images taken through a filter that isolates the glow of hydrogen gas have been coloured red. The total exposure times per filter were 30, 40, 40 and 40 minutes respectively.

This zoom sequence starts with a view of the southern parts of the Milky Way. As we zoom in we can see the spiral galaxy NGC 3621, lying about 22 million light-years from us. The final detailed view shows a new image from the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The data used to make this image were selected from the ESO archive by Joe DePasquale as part of the Hidden Treasures competition.

Credit:

ESO/S. Brunier and Joe DePasquale. Music:John Dyson (from the album “Moonwind”)

via : A Picture-perfect Pure-disc Galaxy

Science astronomy, eso

Wes Bethel (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) , Kelly Gaither (TACC), Hank Childs (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and Sean Ahern (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) are among the leaders today in the visualization community. They, along with John van Rosendale, Dale Southard, and Eric Brugger, have published a whitepaper titled: Visualization From the Skinny Guys at Big Supercomputer Centers. The report takes a look at the importance of the role of data analysis, or scientific visualization, in understanding the results that come from high performance computing systems. Some of the questions that they cover are of particular interest. For example, one question that they ask is whether or not data analysis hardware needs to be separate from the HPC systems, or integrated into the HPC systems. Another question they examine is how large should the data analysis staff be at a Supercomputing Center. Here’s a hat tip to InsideHPC for bringing this whitepaper to our attention.

Supercomputing Centers are unique resources that aim to enable scientic knowledge discovery through the use of large computational resources, the Big Iron. Design, acquisition, installation, and management of the Big Iron are activities that are carefully planned and monitored. Since these Big Iron systems produce a tsunami of data, it is natural to co-locate visualization and analysis infrastructure as part of the same facility. This infrastructure consists of hardware (Big Iron) and staff (Skinny Guys). Our collective experience suggests that design, acquisition, installation, and management of the Little Iron and Skinny Guys does not receive the same level of treatment as that of the Big Iron.

via : Whitepaper: Visualization From the Skinny Guys at Big Supercomputer Centers @ InsideHPC

Science scientific visualization

4Gamer.net has posted pictures of the AMD Radeon 6990, which is codenamed Antilles. Matt Skynner, AMD’s Corporate VP and General Manager of its GPU division, revealed the AMD Radeon 6990 at the AMD Asia Pacific Fusion Tech Day. Inside the AMD Radeon 6990 are two Cayman GPUs. Power is supplied to the card with a 6-pin connector, and an 8-pin connector. The 6990 has a single DVI output and four mini DisplayPorts. The card is estimated to be just shy of 12 inches long. The 6990 is scheduled to ship in the first quarter of this year.

via : 4Gamer.net

Hardware 6990, amd, radeon