Desktop Supercomputer CX1 From Cray

Supercomputers are coming to the desktop. I guess, it was bound to happen someday. This one from the makers of supercomputer CRAY uses Wintel technology for the first time. The horse power comes from 8 nodes of 2 Xeons each and each these could be dual or quad core. That's 32 to 64 processor cores to slice up your workload and work parallely on them. What else is there in the hardware configuration! 4 TB of secondary storage. I ma tempted to make a comment- are you ever going to need more? But the history of computing is full of stories how applications always catch up with whatever capacities are made available for them. Each of the processing nodes have 64 GB memory. Looks like that's a loosely coupled parallelism. 

The whole thing is going to be managed by MS Windows HPC Server 2008. That's a lot of firepower!

Coud Computing And Privacy

Software as a services or sharing sites or whatever such facility one uses on the net can be termed under cloud computing. One common feature of this paradigm of computing is that data is stored on public data centers. Does that mean these data have a less privacy that the data on your desktop! This article brings up this interesting issue. Right now things are undefined and the general perception is that intelligence agencies or law enforcement agencies think these data are more accessible and less protected by the strict privacy environment regarding data on machines owned by you. How should these issues be tackled!

Personally, I was thinking, why shold not we apply the Swiss banking laws here. We are effectively banking our data with these agencies like the Flicr or the Salesforce.com. Unless criminal intent can be proved the privacy about the data on these data ceters should rock solid like the Swiss banks! What say you?

Chrome Shines

I was a day late. I had to wait till it was released in US on the 2nd of Sep which was during my night of the 2nd. But then the experience so far has been great. I downloaded the Chrome on 3rd morning my time and it downloaded without a problem, installed without a problem. When I opened it I like the simple yet attractive( I have preference for all shades of blue anyway). It imported the bookmarkes from my Firefox browser. Asked if I wnated it to become the default browser and so on. 

It felt quite fast and worked with most sites that I tried, while my Firefox 3 beta keeps breaking down when I open some pages, including The EDN pages in particular. Many of the features mentioned in the comic book sound good, I am yet to try them. Certainly looks like the local interface suitable for web based applications. Very low overheds for such use. Let's see how it goes/grows!!

Near HD conversion for DVDs

Toshiba lost out on the high density video recording war to BlueRay. But they have now announced a device that up converts standard DVD to HD resolution of up to 1080p. This would not be quite like HD video recorded on a media that can store it(like Blue Ray for example) but is an improvement on the standard definition DVDs. Standard definition being 480i/p resolution. The device should do well considering the Blue Ray take over of the worls is going to take tiime and until the time HD recorded media are universally available this transition product should do well. At $150 it is cheap enough to tempt people and give their collected SD DVDs a second lease of life!

"Time Bomb" in Software

Release and management thereafter of software products has always been difficult. As size and complexity of the products grow this becomes even more complex. But then there are more reasons for being careful too. The latest problem report comes from one of today's hot products the VMware. The CEO had to publicly apologize on the company website for an oversight that caused quite a few users a lot of stress.

Apparently developers had left some so called "time bombs" in the code, usually done to set a time limit on beta testing for example. These would be/should be cleaned up prior to release but obviously some did not get cleaned up even legitimate users could not install their systems that were paid for and all that.

Also goes to indicate how people in the testing and QA as well as the developers them selves need to be careful about such issues besides the regular bug management issues!

Cottage Industry In The Digital Age

It is possible to collect a set of individuals today and form an enterprise. Unlike the cottage industry of yore these individuals can be anywhere, any part of the globe in fact. It is probably easier to co-ordinate their work except where time difference cause problems. I am in the process of setting up such a virtual enterprise. Who would have thought, even probably 5 years back, such a thing would be possible in India. It's not too difficult to find people with a PC and a internet connection at home who can take up work that can be done on such a combination.

Samsung has announced volume availability of the 128 GB solid state drive. 256 GB drives should be coming out before the year is out. This is getting really interesting. Looks like these multilevel or the MLC flash chips are going to provide the higher capacities fairly quickly. The SLC or the singkle level chip flash technology seemed to slow down around the 60 GB capacities some time back. While HDD have already reached a terabyte capacity with vertical recording technology stuff, the SSDs are not too far behind now. It'll be interesting to watch the race! These 128 GB devices are available in 1.8 and 2.5 inch form factors.

Out of Retirement

I had gone into a kind of retirement by the end of last year. Had been doing some freelance on-line consultancy. Now suddenly I am back at a job again full time. Having been at development management job for such a long time everything I have been doing gives such a sense of deja vu! We flew in, we stayed at a hotel, we hunted around for a house, moved to it. Arranged gas connection, got furnishings and furnitures (that's a change, other times we got the packers & movers to get the furniture and stuff), got phone line, got mobile connections, arranged broadband connectio, the list goes on! On a larger scale there's another deja vu! We came back to Pune. Last dozen year's or so we lived in Pune. We kept going out on job changes yet kept coming back here. In fact, in dec we left Pune to go to Kolkata yet, in 6 montrhs we are back here! Is that destiny or what!!??

Solid State Drives Are Going To Take Over The World!

The world of drives that is! That's what you'd expect with a large blob of solid state memory mimicking the lumbering HDDs with their rotational latencies and seek time and so on ! That's what many an expert would lead you to believe too. But here are two opinions, actually a hands on test and a studied opinion that says that ain't so!

First, some testing results. Bill O'Brien does some testing and is not impressed at all by the performance to two SSD against two old world hard drives. He took 32 GB drives from Advanced Media Inc and Crucial Technologies .

So drive1 was Crucial's internal 2.5" SSD
drive 2 was RiData's 2.5 " SSD
drive 3 was Seagate's Barracuda 3.5" HDD
drive 4 was Seagate's Momentus 2.5 "

Test results came up as follows.

Dr1 Dr2 Dr3 Dr4

Burst Speed 137.3 71.2 135 214.3 MB/sec
Boot Speed 40 32 40 40 Sec
Restart time 78.6 54.8 59.9 55.6 Sec
Data copying 243 264.5 185 185 Sec*

* for 4666 files totaling 8.05 GB of data, copied to/fro. because at the end of the day the SSD drive data may have to be sync'ed to the main system. Conclusion: no significant gain in any department.

On the other hand the HDD's keep growing in size. 1 TB or a 1000 GB drives are mainstream. That's quite a lead over the SSD's of 60 GB may be! I am sure both are going to be in use for a long time to come!

PSLV launches 10 satellites In One Go!

PSLV's thirteenth flight on Apr 28th successfully deployed the payload of 10 satellites that it carried. The main one was the the Cartosat 2A, Indian mini satellite IMS-1. The mini satellite is going to be a test vehicle of future technologies. Cartosat , of course, is the mapping vehicle of the dept of space. These two were the heavyweights. Cartosat is 690 kg, the minisat is 83 kg respectively.

The other eight were micro satellites from universities and research institutes in Canada and Germany. Sapce technology surely has come a long way since the late seventies and early eighties when I had first contacts with the ISRO ( Indian Space Research Organization) ever!!

Eee PC 900 is Born!!

I discussed the news about XP support on the UMPC or the ULCPC as some call them couple of days back. Now comes news of Asus releasing their biggest UMPC, the 9" Eee PC 900 family. Besides the 8.9" display at 1024x 600, the system has 1 GB memory, a 1.3 MP camera, a 12/ 20 SSD and a multi touch trackpad. Either Linux or XP indtalled the machines with XP come with the smaller drive.

The first reveiw that has appeared is also quite complimentary. particularly in the value for money department the series 900 scores a perfect 10. The scorecard reads as follows,

Design 9/10
Features 8/10
Performance 8/10
Value for money 10/10
Overall 9/10

The price is expected to be around $500.

MontaVista Linux Available for Atom Now!!

MontaVista Linux version has been released for the new Intel Atom 2500 processors. These power efficient processors are positioned as the processing heart of a new generation of mobile internet devices that possibly address a very very focussed functionality rather than trying to be a general purpose processor/PC.

Linux has successfully been used in a range of devices with the real time version from MontaVista being successful in mobile devices and a range of appliances. This commercial grade release should help rapid design for connected devices with the Intel Atom processors. The release is supposedly optimized for programmed power management for longer battery life, 802.11n support that provides Wi-Fi connectivity and Bluetooth support for connectivity and speedy boot up. The power efficient Intel processors are expected drive a new class of devices.

UMPCs Are Growing !

Looks like more companies are coming out with these ultra mobile stuff. Latest announcement comes from Everex. But that's not the musings here about. I notice dome trends happening with these new fangled devices.

First and foremost of course is the price. Whatever devices are for sell almost all cost upwards of $300. There's something interesting here. People are ready to pay higher for a smaller and most often less capable device. Popularity of Asus Eee PC is an indicator to that. Also there's this constant push for bigger display real estate that sees 20", 27" or even bigger displays on the desktop and sizes like 17" coming over on laptops, here's device that does with a lot less. Displays on these devices are around 8"diagonal.

Other major thing is that solid state drives are finally here. These SSD devices of useful size is likely to become the sole drive on such notebooks first, looks like.

Intel Atom Processor

Ultra portables or the UMPCs are taking off looks like. So does the Intel Atom processor. Engadget announced the Intel made Atom based UMPC. This is how it looks.












Couple of other machines are being shown off at the Intel Developer's Forum at Shanghai. Asus has announced a Eee based on the Atom, that is well known. But Thinno's Eee clone was a surprise item.
Register Hardware reports from IDF at Shanghai:

Intel was keen to show off its Atom processor in the run-up to Intel Developer Forum (IDF), and drummed up a trio of machines to show it off - including the 7in Asus Eee PC.

Asus' plan to adopt Atom is well known, at least as far as the upcoming 8.9in Eee PC 900 goes. Less well known is new brand Thinno, which was showing its unnamed Eee-alternative. Demo'd with two laptops - one running Red Hat Linux; the other, Windows XP - the Thinno machines were fitted with 1.6GHz Atoms and 512MB of memory.

It's worth keeping a eye on the UMPC developments as well as the Atom.

UMPC Or The Ultra Mobile PC

Recently came across this again with quite a force. While working with the deal site work I have been seeing the reference to ultra mobile machines quite often, though of a particular model from Asus. But that did clearly indicate this category of notebooks is actually growing.

Then came across this blog dedicated to UMPCs. I was a little surprised at the variety of models that are getting quite a bit popular. Though I missed the opportunity for writing about them, the idea keeps swirling in my mind that I should go ahead and start writing about them. This may become of the niches I am looking for eventually.

VIA technologies' C7 chip seems to be getting quite poplar as x86 compatible processor of choice for such devices. May be I should start with an article on this little chip first!

Portable Audio Player Hall Of Fame

CNET featured some 9 portable audio/MP3 players recently. I was looking at the photos published in the slide-show referred to in that article. All the 9 shown below in one collage here.


Interesting how when new devices come into the market all kinds of features are tried out. Then as the products mature the features mature too. Almost all of these 9 devices have similar features. Originally they were just MP3 players but now they are turning into more of media players. Video playing becoming a big requirement. FM radio has become standard as has photo viewing feature. Most of them thus have a LCD screen that can show the video reasonably comfortably.

Back in 1983 while traveling to US for the first time I had a stopover at Tokyo Narita airport and had stayed at the Nikki Narita hotel, courtesy Japan Airlines. As I was window shopping I was amazed by the really small color TV model that had remarkable images. Almost like high quality photograph. Obviously on small screen the usual TV image blemishes were not noticeable. That possibly was a small CRT, these are LCDs, video viewing ought to be very comfortable on these devices!!

Top MP3 Players

CNET lists top MP3 players here. According to them the following are the top ones.

• Microsoft Zune
• iPod Touch
• Creative ZenV Plus
• iRiver Clix
• Cowon iAudio 7
• Samsung YP-T9
• Sandisk Sansa Clip
• Archos 605WiFi

Common traits are of course great sound quality, nice designs and friendly interface of course. Then we keep getting more and more storage and more and more play time per charge. As screen size keeps growing video play also is getting sophisticated. Photo viewing has been part of these devices almost from the start and did you notice how voice recorder and FM radio features too joined the feature crowding on these devices! It's almost like all the entertainment stuff you need, you have them in the palm of your hand wherever you go!

Contrary Views

I did a review of a product recently. I liked the product and said so in the review. The product is good. It helps you manage physical as well as computer files in a really very efficient way. You should be able to find the piece of paper you wanted, very easily. That usually is the problem we all face everyday.

While thinking about it, I realized , a contrary view also is possible. One of the ways things are changing is a trend to have everything in the computer including information that is on paper today. The thinking is to get these scanned and manage every bit of document via the computer. If that approach is valid, then the view held by the product that we may be dealing with a mix of electronic and physical documents cannot be a very valid approach. It may actually be following the scanning approach.

Which is the right view! I guess, if we are worrying about now then the approach taken by the product under review is valid but soon enough it may be the next approach which ought to be taken. The basic issue really is where exactly we are. Are we into that all electronic future yet! Only time will tell, I guess!!!

Working From Home

Never thought I'll actually do this, though have been watching the trend and been excited about it. Doing projects from is eminently viable. As I see the practice building up, I can generate enough money to survive well and pay for my home mortgage, it feels good! The flexible hours, being there with the family, particularly my little granddaughter is a true bonus! Let's see how this plays out.