Interesting 64 core Processors

Sun recently announced the T2 CPU. It has 8 cores, each capable of running 8 threads simultaneously. That’s like 64 processing threads running in parallel! All that happens with only 95W energy consumption!! That translates into a awesome processing power in servers helped my Solaris that makes development easier.
Now if we had a true 64 core processor that worked for less than 20 watts!! Hat would be amazing!!!!!!!!!!!
Tilera announced recently that they have such a chip called the Tile 64. Please read detailed story here. One of the major problems with multi core chips( I have blooged about this before) is the main system bus on the chip which starts to saturate with data flow despite multi level caches in the architecture. Tilera claims that they have overcome this problem so that truly massively parallel chips would now be possible. CPU cores in the Tile 64 chip exchange data through a mesh architecture and no such bottleneck exists. A switching matrix interconnects processors and there are separate memory controllers.


The Tile 64 processor has a RISC architecture and offered at clock speeds of 600 MHz and 1GHz speeds. He switches can transmit data to 4 of its neighbors at 500 Gbps rates. These processors are positioned for usage in routers, switches, appliances, video conferencing and Set top boxes.

crossroads

Life has a strange way of bringing you down to some crossroads when you have to decide the direction you want to take from then on. I am at one such. Having reached 60 years of age I am at a traditional point one retires from professional life. I am just out of an assignment and could easily take that path.

I do, however, feel I have quite a mileage left still. I have always wanted to teach. My father and grandfathers have been teachers, may be that's why. Maybe I understand things well and then love to explain that to others! I have found that to be true all along my student days as well as during my professional life.

During student years loved to lead informal study groups that always formed. Similarly jumped at an opportunity to train others whenever such opportunities arose during working years. I really, truly enjoyed the experience too. So why not!!

teragrid the superpowered supercomputing grid

National center for supercomputing associations announced a super powered computing grid. While 280 teraflops of computing power and 20 petabytes of storage is impressive, it is the user interface that is supposed to be the crucial element for users.

Is anyone going to need more computing power! Well, it is always an application coming along that needs more resources than is available and thus catching up with all the available resources. It has happened always in computing history and I'm sure it is going to happen soon on this "teragrid" too. Until then it'll make the life of researchers in advanced areas easier quite a bit.

Wireless World: Approaching the Wireline Barrier

The biggest problem with wireless networks has been the fact that we are dealing with a limited bandwidth broadcast medium (that and security, which is a completely different story, though not completely unrelated). The best technology widely available at this time is IEEE 802.11a & g (Wi-Fi) which both work at a maximum rate of 54Mbps (though perceived data rate is much lower and also the data rate available per user when there are a number of users sharing the channel as is typically the case in any network). Therefore they are nowhere close to current Ethernet (100Mbps/1Gps). Moreover, the current brand of Ethernet is not exactly a broadcast technology but a switched technology, therefore not all users share the 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps (the sharing is quite complicated and depends essentially on the switch - I'll discuss this in a future post).

The solution seems to be the upcoming IEEE 802.11n standard which makes use of MIMO technology to achieve much higher bandwidths (claims are being made for upto >500 Mbps, but that for me literally means that we can expect decent 100/200 Mbps performance). That is going to be an interesting step towards reducing wires.

In related news, one of the things that limits any Wireless technology is power, and with Laptops etc we eventually have a situation where we need wires for power. However a group at MIT seems to be coming up with a solution to that problem. If this comes through then this really is the step towards a wireless world. Read about it here.

Incredible Journey of 800 ps

The Programming Logic Designline features a wonderful article called the incredible journey of an 800 picosecond period. Now thats 800 picoseconds = 0.8 nanoseconds = 0.0008 microseconds = 0.0000008 milliseconds = 0.0000000008 seconds, which truly boggles the mind when you consider all that is happening during this time.

Read the article here it's more than a useful read, in fact it is fairly informative and even entertaining.

Microsoft's New Surface Computer

A lot of people in the computing community tend to undermine Microsoft, often saying that Microsoft has done nothing of note and exists mostly by copying or living off of other people's ideas. Although they have a point, in that MS is famous for taking other people's ideas; they also miss the point that MS is great at marketing products (even if it is through aggressive brand placement and tie-ups - everybody major business does it, including Mr. Steve "Fashionable" "Apple" Jobs) and also developing them further. From time to time, Microsoft has also come up with good ideas (which in time others have followed). It can be argued that those ideas were in fact taken from other smaller companies etc which they bought out, but that would also be true of Apple or any other competitor.

The latest offering from Microsoft is the amazing new surface computer. Here is a youtube video showinf what it's capable of (in typical MS fashion there is at least the one blemish :) ) -




Here are some links to find out more about it:
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/29/microsoft-announces-surface-computer/

Certainly looks like the future of computing, especially for Artists, Designers, Engineers and the like. The Tablet PC (another concept popularized by MS) helps to some extent and this is the logical next step. We are probably a few years away from a feasible and affordable variant though. But this is promising. After a long time, something in the Computer world that excites me.

Sidenote: A lot of people exist in that Mac vs. Windows debate - but it is really a useless debate - because after all the fight over who came up with what is pretty pointless since most personal computer (and I include Macs in that category) ideas originated at that fantastic R&D center known as Xerox PARC. Of course, people outside of the Computing industry are unaware of this and that's ok, but what surprises me is how easily they are willing to fight for their respective loyalties and also how a lot of people who are from a Computing background are unaware of this.

The real debate is Windows vs. Linux or to be exact proprietary vs. free, but that debate is out of the scope of this post. Suffice to say, that in the honest opinion of anyone who deals with computers and loves them the answer is simple: It's all good.

Whether Microsoft or Apple should be stopped from doing the things they do is part of bigger question, that of Capitalism and what is acceptable there. The rich always persecute the poor, and that is unacceptable.

But consider this: that the Gates foundation is the largest Independent Charity Organization in the World. Where would that be without Microsoft?

Yahoo! India Maps

Yahoo! has 170 cities, 4785 towns and more than 220,000 village maps that's searchable on features that can be address, street name or things like ATM or hospital locations. Yahoo! alongwith CE Infosystems have produced the maps. Ever since getting involved in GIS services this is one thing I have been hearing about such detailed maps in Indian context. Looks like it's happening finally. GIS is certainly going to become mainstream soon.

Another offering from Yahoo that's interesting is "our city". This site aggregates dynamic content about specific cities, available currently for 20 of them.

Really interesting!!!