http://www.codezulu.com CZ News :: Your Source for Gaming and Technology Related Information en_US http://www.codezulu.com/ http://www.codezulu.com/images/rss_logo.gif http://www.codezulu.com/default.asp#1053 A privately financed team of scientists and engineers is nearing completion of a special-purpose supercomputer intended to offer more than a thousandfold increase in performance for complex molecular simulations. The machine, named Anton, in homage to Anton van Leeuwenhoek, a pioneer in microbiology, is a bold gamble to jump ahead of the most powerful general-purpose supercomputers by as much as a half decade. It could be used to investigate problems of great scientific interest, like the folding of protein molecules, and in the design of drugs based on the simulated biological activity of different molecules. ... Anton is massively parallel, with 517 specialized processors working simultaneously. The processors are called application-specific integrated circuits, and in this case their specialty is the calculation of the three-dimensional characteristics of molecules. Despite the publication of a detailed technical description of his computer, Mr. Shaw declined to be interviewed about the project. “At this stage of our research, though, we’ve been trying to communicate our results largely through academic talks and peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals,” he wrote in an e-mail message. ... By looking at time scales that last several orders of magnitude longer than today’s simulations, the Anton team is hoping to discover new kinds of biological processes that would not otherwise be observable. “If you can do 1,000 times longer, real proteins come into play,” Mr. Shaw said in a technical lecture in 2006 at Stanford describing his work. Full Article - Free Registration Required. http://www.codezulu.com/default.asp#1052 In Silicon Valley, the stars have long been charismatic marketing visionaries and cool-nerd software wizards. By contrast, mechanical engineers who design and run computer data centers were traditionally regarded as little more than blue-collar workers in the high-tech world. For years, they toiled in relative obscurity in the engine rooms of the digital economy, amid the racks of servers and storage devices that power everything from online videos to corporate e-mail systems. Their mission was to keep the computing power plants humming, while scant thought was given to rising costs and energy consumption. Today, data center experts are no longer taken for granted. The torrid growth in data centers to keep pace with the demands of Internet-era computing, their immense need for electricity and their inefficient use of that energy pose environmental, energy and economic challenges, experts say. That means people with the skills to design, build and run a data center that does not endanger the power grid are suddenly in demand. Their status is growing, as are their salaries — climbing more than 20 percent in the last two years into six figures for experienced engineers. Full Article - Free Registration Required. http://www.codezulu.com/default.asp#1051 An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, N.M. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion. Full Article - Free Registration Required. http://www.codezulu.com/default.asp#1050 LOOK at him standing there, a great big movie star in a great big movie, the Iron Man with nary a trace of human frailty. A scant five years ago the only time you saw Robert Downey Jr. getting big play in your newspaper came when he was on a perp walk. Yet when it came time for Marvel Studios to cast the lead for a huge franchise film, “Iron Man,” it bet on Mr. Downey. He is not only back in the game but at the top of it. Is this a great country or what? Full Article - Free Registration Required. http://www.codezulu.com/default.asp#1049 Learning how to turn a flashlight into a laser is not a top priority for most people. Yet Kip Kedersha’s step-by-step instructional video that teaches how to do just that has been seen online by more people (1.88 million) than live in Manhattan (about 1.6 million). Mr. Kedersha’s online library of 94 videos includes tips on how to chill a Coke in two minutes, simulate a gunshot wound and start up a PC quickly. Many of the clips have been played hundreds of thousands of times, turning Mr. Kedersha into the top earner on Metacafe, a video-sharing Web site that pays the makers of popular videos. In little more than a year, the site has written him checks totaling $102,000. That puts Mr. Kedersha, a 50-year-old video producer from St. Petersburg, Fla., near the front of the latest online stampede: the rush to capitalize on the popularity of how-to videos on the Web. “You never know when something like this is going to go away,” Mr. Kedersha said. “I better ride the wave.” Full Article - Free Registration Required. Flashlight Hack http://www.codezulu.com/default.asp#1048 http://www.codezulu.com/default.asp#1047 A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a "voiceless" phone call for the first time. With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice. Full Article Ambient Corporation http://www.codezulu.com/default.asp#1046