Tag: Computing

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Los Alamos Lab's Roadrunner Supercomputer To Be Shut Down

The fastest supercomputer in the world in 2009 will be shutdown today, according to the Los Alamos National Labs.

8599713655_c725fb6f3d_bRoadrunner, the first supercomputer to break the once-elusive petaflop barrier—one million billion calculations per second—will be decommissioned on Sunday, March 31.

Roadrunner’s design was unique, and controversial. It combined two different kinds of processors, making it a “hybrid.” It had 6,563 dual-core general-purpose processors (AMD Opterons™), with each core linked to a special graphics processor (PowerXCell 8i) called a “Cell.” The Cell was an enhanced version of a specialized processor originally designed for the Sony Playstation 3®, adapted specifically to support scientific computing.

Future supercomputers will need to improve on Roadrunner’s energy efficiency to make the power bill affordable. Future supercomputers will also need new solutions for handling and storing the vast amounts of data involved in such massive calculations.

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The Cocoa Conspiracy: Albuquerque's iPhone Developers

KOB recently did an interesting article on a group of independent iPhone developers in Albuquerque who work at a coffee shop and call themselves the Cocoa Conspiracy. The group includes Andrew Stone of Stone Design who has a number of both Mac and iPhone applications.

Apparently Stone Design’s Twittelator Proicon is doing well. The article also talks about a very cool sounding hot air balloon and chase crew app.

“It can actually overlay the chase group’s position and the balloon’s location and speed over a map live. That way people can plan their routes to get to the balloon and where it’s going to land,”

That’s an awesome idea, I wish I would have thought of it. Albuquerque has “Largest balloon convention in the world” according to Wikipedia so it’s fitting that a app like this should be developed in Albuquerque.

I want to hook up with these guys perhaps they can give me some help in developing my own apps. The article fails to mention what coffee shop the “The Cocoa Conspiracy” hang out at.

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Update: The group has a website at cocoaconspiracy.com and apparently meet at the RB Winnings Coffee Thursdays at 9:30 am.