Argonne National Laboratory will soon have the data analytics and visualization capability to complement its distinction as the fastest computer in the world for open science. Argonne awarded GraphStream, Inc. a contract that will help to make data analytics and visualization at this scale possible through the world’s largest installation of NVIDIA Quadro® Plex S4 external graphics processing units (GPU). This new supercomputer installation, nicknamed Eureka, will allow researchers to explore and visualize the data they produce with Intrepid. The powerful installation will offer 104 dual quad core servers with 208 Quadro FX5600 GPUs in the S4s.

Using the NVIDIA Quadro Plex S4 visual computing system as the base graphics building block, Eureka will deliver a quantum leap in visual compute density, enabling breakthrough levels of productivity and capability in visualization and data analysis,

said Craig Dunwoody, CEO of GraphStream. The base server building block is the SuperMicro 6015-UR. The S4 attaches to a server on either side of it, forming a “sandwich.” To the servers, it appears as if they have two Quadro FX5600 graphics cards inside of them. While there are small system disks in the server, all of the data comes from the large storage system over the network.

Economical, low-latency modular switches represent the heart of the data-management system. The nine-switch complex supports up to 2,048 connections, each of which simultaneously exchanges data at roughly 1 billion bytes per second. The storage system offers a bank of more than 10,000 disk drives that will send and receive data from the Blue Gene/P’s more than 100,000 processors. Altogether, this system can deliver nearly 80 billion bytes per second to and from the disk—the equivalent of transferring the content of 100 full CDs every second.

Read full press release here.

Great article by Barbara Robertson over at studiodaily.com, outlining the process of creating the VFX shots for the new Batman movie (The Dark Night). I have to admit I did not love the movie like many others, but the VFX were first rate and after reading this article I have a better appreciation of what went into it. WOWWEE 8-).

Hehehe, yeah people used to make fun of me when I mentioned how much I hate Robbers (Rogers) and Compressview (Expressview) services in Canada and that I would refuse to pay for their so called HD premium service because I KNOW what kinda abuse the content goes through before it gets to my TV. I’ve since switched to OTA (Over The Air) HD and yes I don’t get all the Discovery/Food/Bravo channels in HD, but then again what is your definition of HD I ask?

Anyways, for those of you who’re still entrusting Robbers, Compressview and/or others, have a quick peak at this article on Popular Mechanics website.

So how do you emulate the human vision system. Well if you ask either Nicolos Pinto, David Cox or James DiCarlo, they’ll probably point at the harmless looking machine sitting in the corner of their lab. The machine in question is “quietly” humming away as it tries to simulate a real-time human level artificial vision system using it’s 8 (YES EIGHT) 9800GX2 NVIDIA graphics cards. Have a quick look at this flickr album to get an idea of the size of this beast .

Yeeeeeaaaa, It’s X-mas all over again. Google takes another step to free you from your MS/Exchange/.me addiction. No more need to get a “Cloud” account to sync up your calendars, No more jumping through hoops with sync connector programs that don’t work. Google has added CalDAV support to Google Calendar…….Read all about it here.

Okay so it’s read-only access, but it’s Free . Have a look at HFSExplorer the next time you need to grab a file from that mac formatted firewire drive. It’s a little Java program that allows you full read access to any HFS+/HFSX formatted disk. It works nicely under boot camp to give you access to your OSX partition or even a MAC formatted IPOD. As a bonus the app even allows you access to HFS+ formatted .dmg files without any conversion……what more do you need??? Oh and did I mention it’s FREE.

Yep, you can finally do it and it’s gonna cost you nothing. Thanks to the free Pismo File Mount utility windows users can now also enjoy the ease of mounting a ISO CD/DVD image and/or a ZIP file as a Virtual folder. Lots of cool possibilities and you can’t beat FREE.

Yep, we’ve all been there. You buy a cheap PC/Notebook and there is no driver disk provided with the package. You of course curse the manufacturer and then get down trying to figure out what driver file does what. After about 5-6 hours you finally realize that your attempts at backing up the drivers that the machine came with is totally useless.

Then you either Cry, Reinstall and hope for the best or become extra nice to your family and “give” them a expensive looking laptop as a gift. But wait you could have used Double Driver to backup all the drivers that came pre-installed on your system…..ohh well too late, maybe next time you’ll read my blog before giving away that laptop/desktop machine .

Yep, we’ve all been there. You buy a cheap PC/Notebook and there is no driver disk provided with the package. You of course curse the manufacturer and then get down trying to figure out what driver file does what. After about 5-6 hours you finally realize that your attempts at backing up the drivers that the machine came with is totally useless.

Then you either Cry, Reinstall and hope for the best or become extra nice to your family and “give” them a expensive looking laptop as a gift. But wait you could have used Double Driver to backup all the drivers that came pre-installed on your system…..ohh well too late, maybe next time you’ll read my blog before giving away that laptop/desktop machine .

Yep, We’ve all been there. Some stupid program locks a file on your USB key and the eject process becomes useless. Next, you’re sitting there going, “Hmmmm, should I just bite the bullet and remove the key manually”. You could, but then you’ll be tempting fate and you know what they say about that Murphy guy .

Enter EjectUSB, THE FREE Util to let you find the culprit process (you know the one locking up your key) and kill it, hence freeing up your key to be properly ejected. Have Fun and be safe!!!

Not sure if this madness will be the next big thing for the Demo Scene, but it sure is nice to see some the younger generation using their talents to come up with these circuits. In the old days — yeah I’m gonna date myself now — I used to do Demo programming on the C-64 and the Amiga 1000 later on, we had dedicated processors and although we did some heavy duty low-level programming, it wasn’t too bad.

The stuff that Linus Akesson and his buddies have come up with are actually brilliant in that they are very analog in nature. Don’t get me wrong, it is a micro doing all that, but the thought process behind the algorithm is very analog…..here is a excerpt of what it all entails:

One display line takes 24 μs, and is followed by a 7.75 μs break called the horizontal blanking period. After 480 such lines, there’s a longer break (1428.75 μs, equal to 45 full display lines) before it all starts over. Two digital signals are used to synchronize the sender (graphics card, custom demo hardware etc.) and the receiver (monitor).
[...]
Sound is generated during the horizontal blanking periods. That gives a sample rate of 31496 kHz. Of course, only the really timing critical part (waveform generation) is performed during the horizontal blanking. Melody, rhythm, amplitude envelopes, arpeggios etc. are handled by a playroutine which gets called once for every video frame, during vertical blanking.

Have a peek at the video…..It’s mind blowing

Just came across Searchme: today (thanks to Leo Laporte). It is to search engines what OSX is to GUI’s. It uses flash for interface design and it’s absolutely beautiful (and functional). It’s great to finally be able to “SEE” your search results before leaving the search site. I know there are several “preview” extensions out there for firefox that preload the website in a small popup window, but searchme is so much nicer and easier to use. If you’re doing any sort of research the ability to reorder things (hits) in a stack and to create multiple stacks is god sent. The best way to start is to try your own name, once you get familiar with the GUI, then start searching for other stuff.

Yeah it rained pretty heavily this morning and I’m a sucker for Droplets…..

If you don’t get it click on this link to the large version…figure it out yet? Come on, tick-tock, tick-tock…..

PC Wizard 2008 is a great little utility to keep handy next time you want to find system information on a unknown computer or if you want to do some thorough benchmarking to find those bottlenecks….For Free. Below you’ll find a highlight of what it offers:

Hardware Information

• Mainboard / Bios (Connectors, ID String, MP Support …)
• Chipset (FSB Frequency, Norhtbridge, Hub, Direct Media Interface, XMB, NSI, …)
• Main Memory (FPM, EDO, SDRAM, DDR SDRAM, DDR-2 SDRAM, DDR-3 SDRAM, RDRAM, FB_DIMM, Timings …)
• Memory Profiles : EPP (SLi Ready), Intel XMP.
• Cache Memory (L1, L2, L3, Size, Frequency …)
• Processors (Type, Speed, Multiplier coeff., Features, Model Number, Vanderpool Technology …)
• Coprocessor
• APM & ACPI
• Busses : ISA, PCI, AGP (2x, 4x,8x), SMBus/ i2c, CardBus, Firewire, Hyper-Transport … )
• DMI / SMBIOS
• Mainboard Sensors, Processor, Hard Disk & Battery (Voltage, Temperature, Fans)
• Video (Monitor, Card, Bios, Capabilities, Memory, Integrated Memory, Frequencies …)
• OpenGL & 3Dfx
• DirectX (DirectDraw, Direct3D, DirectSound (3D), DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectInput, DirectX Media)
• Keyboard, Mouse & Joystick
• Drives (Hard Disk, Removable, CD-ROM, CDRW, DVD …)
• SCSI (Card, Controller, Adapter, Devices …)
• ATA/ATAPI & S-ATA (Devices, Type, Capabilities, S.M.A.R.T. Features, RAID)
• Ports (Serial, Parallel, USB, IEEE-1394)
• IDE & SCSI Devices
• Twain & WIA Devices
• PCMCIA (PC Card) Devices
• Bluetooth Devices
• Sound Card (wave, midi, aux, mix, AC’97 codec, High Definition Audio)
• Printers (Local & Network)
• Modem (Features, Speed …)
• Network (Server, Connexion, Firewall …)
• Security (Scan Ports …)
• PocketPC & SmartPhone Devices

System Information

• MCI Devices (mpeg, avi, seq, vcr, video-disc, wave) & ACM
• SAPI
• Passwords (Outlook, Internet Explorer, MSN Messenger, Dialup …)
• DOS Memory (base, HMA, UMB, XMS, EMS, DPMI, VCPI)
• Windows Memory
• Windows (Version, Product Key, Environment, Desktop, XP Themes …)
• Windows UpTime (Boot, Shutdown, BlueScreen, System Restore Points …)
• TrueType & OpenType Fonts
• WinSock (Internet), Telephony et Remote Access
• OLE (Objects, Servers …)
• Microsoft® Applications
• Activity (Process, Tasks, Threads)
• Modules (DLL, DRV, 32 & 16-bits) & NT Services
• Internet Navigator (Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, FireFox)
• ODBC
• CMOS/RTC
• Resources (IRQ, DMA, E/S, Memory)
• System files (.ini, .log, .bat, .nt, .dos …)

System Benchmarks

• Processor (Dhrystone (MIPS), Whetstone (MFLOPS), Mandelbrot fractal …)
• L1, L2, L3 Cache, RAM (Bandwidth, Latency …)
• Main Memory (Bandwidth, Latency …)
• Hard Drives
• CD/DVD Rom
• DirectX 3D
• Video
• Removable/Flash Support
• MP3 Compression
• VISTA Experience Index

If you ever need to scan the airwaves for wireless accesspoints, you might want to try the new AirRadar. Yes, there are other programs out there that do similar things (AirStatz or iStumbler), but AirRadar also supports GROWL which is kinda nice

Have you ever had problems ejecting a disk or emptying your trash under OSX. Did you waste time trying to find the offending program. Well “What’s Keeping Me?” is for you. Just run it the next time you get one of these errors, tell it the name of the file that’s giving you grief and it will return a list of processes that have locked that file. Then you have the option of killing those processes. Nice little free util to add to your collection.

This brand new Kraak and Smaak video is just too cool. Makes me want to do some flipbooking of my own. Great visuals and well fantastic music to boot…..enjoy .

I don’t do this often, but this program actually proves that with a little bit of extra UI work, windows programs can look as good (if not better) than their OSX counter parts. Pictomio — which is a free btw — is a software application for managing, categorizing, searching, and archiving photos and other media files, and allows you to generate animated 2D and 3D slideshows. It’s an image viewer like no other. You really have to download it and take it for a spin to get a appreciation for it’s interface nuances. It really makes me want to view my images in Windowsland right now. Pictomio is made up of three modules, a photo browser and slideshow editor, a slideshow viewer, and a slideshow screensaver. Highly recommended.

Yeeaaaa, wait long enough and the 2.0 version will give you atleast half of the features you’re looking for. I always thought that Drobo was a great device but I refused to buy one since it was only USB2.0 device. Well, that was yesterday, today Drobo announced the availability of the same great Drobo features, but now with Firewire800 to boot…..woohoo.

For those of you who don’t know Drobo is a external drive housing that has the next generation of raid protection built in and can literally take four different drives of any size and present them as a unified storage disk with raid protection. If you want to find out more info please see this page under technology tab. The barebones Drobo will sell for $499, while a 2TB model is $899 and at 4TB it’s $1299. Now if they could only add E-SATA and Network to this little guy, that would be perfect.