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!!