Science FAQ:

Q: What do you get when you cross an elephant and a grape?
A: Elephant x Grape x sin(alpha)
Q: What do you get when you cross an Elephant and a mountain climber?
A: You can’t cross a vector and a scaler!

Q: What is the difference between a Quantum Theorist and a Beauty Therapist?
A: The Quantum Theorist uses Planck’s Constant as a foundation, whereas the Beauty Therapist uses Max Factor.

Q: Why does e^x hate going to parties?
A: Because no matter how hard he tries, he always fails to integrate.

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8th July, 2008 No Comments

With the June 9 announcement that the IBM supercomputer “RoadRunner” is the first system to reach the 1 petaflop/s level, the HPC community is entering a realm of unprecedented computing power.

Roadrunner supercomputer, built by IBM with funding from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) for Los Alamos National Laboratory, achieved a long-sought supercomputing goal: performing more than a thousand trillion operations per second, or petaflop/s. Roadrunner is the first supercomputer to use a hybrid processor architecture, which is based on 6,912 dual-core Opteron X64 processors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and 12,960 IBM Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell BE) processing elements. The Roadrunner system has 98 terabytes of memory, and is housed in 278 refrigerator-sized, IBM BladeCenter® racks occupying 5,200 square feet. Its 10,000 connections – both Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet — require 55 miles of fiber optic cable. Roadrunner weighs 500,000 lbs. At the end of May, the system posted a peak performance of 1.026 petaflop/s running the Linpack benchmark. This test consisted of solving linear equations involving more than 2 million equations and an equal number of unknowns. Roadrunner is also rated as very energy (performance/watt) efficient (green).

For me, breaking the petaflop/s barrier is the equivalent of a runner finally running the 100-meter race in 9.5 seconds — a level of performance everyone hopes for but proves elusive to actually achieve. This will be the third time at ISC that we will have a presentation about the almost magical surpassing of a thousand-fold increase in HPC performance. Twenty-two years ago, in 1986, the legendary Cray 2 passed the 1 gigaflop/s level, and in June of that year we held the first ISC. Eleven years later, when the Intel ASCI Red system landed atop the 9^th TOP500 list presented at the conference, this was the first time a system reached the teraflop/s level. And now RoadRunner has cracked the next magical barrier and will be number one on the 31^st edition of the TOP500 list.

said Prof. Hans Meuer, general chair of ISC and founder of the TOP500 list.

11th June, 2008 No Comments

“Space in typography is like time in music. It is infinitely divisible, but a few proportional intervals can be much more useful than a limitless choice of arbitrary quantities.” So says the typographer Robert Bringhurst, and just as regular use of time provides rhythm in music, so regular use of space provides rhythm in typography, and without rhythm the listener, or the reader, becomes disorientated and lost.

On the Web, vertical rhythm — the spacing and arrangement of text as the reader descends the page — is contributed to by three factors: font size, line height and margin or padding. All of these factors must calculated with care in order that the rhythm is maintained. The basic unit of vertical space is line height. Establishing a suitable line height that can be applied to all text on the page is the key to a solid dependable vertical rhythm. It will engage and guide the reader down the page.

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29th May, 2008 No Comments