I’m looking forward to reading more about Blue Gene/P (coming to Argonne!). Excerpt from the press release:
ARMONK, NY - 26 Jun 2007: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced Blue Gene/P, the second generation of the world’s most powerful supercomputer. Blue Gene/P nearly triples the performance of its predecessor, Blue Gene/L — currently the world’s fastest computer — while remaining the most energy-efficient and space-saving computing package ever built.
The IBM® System Blue Gene®/P Solution scales to operate continuously at speeds exceeding one “petaflop” — or one-quadrillion operations per second. The system is 100,000 times more powerful than a home PC and can process more operations in one second than the combined power of a stack of laptop computers nearly 1.5 miles high. The Blue Gene/P supercomputer can be configured to reach speeds in excess of three petaflops, a performance level that many thought unattainable only a few short years ago.
I will be too busy in the coming month to post much here. I will keep adding sites to the gridindex.org search engines and updating the event list. In all likelihood will keep making brief news item entries. Enjoy your summer (or winter)!
From Quantum Scoop: The Holy Grail of particle physics may already have been found which was linked on Slashdot yesterday.
The current rumor, which comes in time for the summer conference circuit, may be different. It claims an experiment at the Tevatron has found a peak twice as high as the previous rumors’ bumps. And unlike the other rumors, this one includes details: the new particle’s mass, for instance, which fits within theoretical bounds on the standard model Higgs. Some versions include a decay chain, which describes what the new particle turned into as the experiment progressed, and which may be consistent with the standard model’s predictions.
Here is an interesting video of a talk given by Ari Zilka (CTO and founder of Terracotta Technologies) to employees of Google. Terracotta was recently open sourced and is receiving good reviews and attention. I am excited to experiment with it.
Now that Java 6 has been released, people are starting to talk more about the future of the language. I noticed Kirk Pepperdine’s comments in Java 7.0 language feature considered harmful:
“I’ve just watched the Danny Corward presentation at the Prague JUG on what could be coming in the JSE 7.0. In that presentation he demonstrated the “->” operator. The purpose of the operator is to provide a short hand notatino for properties. The syntax that we would normally use is;
a.setFoo( b->getFoo());
With the “->” operator we would see;
a->foo = b->foo;
How we’d currrently coding this is;
a.foo = b.foo where foo would have to be more visiable than private.”
He goes on to comment on how this violates OO data encapsulation principles and I agree with his arguments about these principles themselves, but I don’t see what the problem with syntactic sugar for very standard method calls is (I am assuming this proposed syntax is, as he suggests, just syntactic sugar for getFoo() and setFoo(x) and that the resulting bytecode is the same). This is just a compiler facilitating something already possible, like using:
String[] x = {"one", "two"};
instead of:
String[] x = new String[2];
x[0] = "one";
x[1] = "two";
As someone who likes Python a lot, it’s a natural thing for me to see “a.foo = x” and understand that a set method could have been executed. You can use “__getattr__” and “__setattr__” to override member access/mutation via instance.property syntax. This can be employed to do useful things behind the scenes while maintaining simple, legible code (such as in SQLObject).
If only it weren’t far too late for Java to eliminate the ability to do direct instance.property access altogether and have that mean get/set instead :-).
The Google patent search interface was launched recently. I would like to find time to search through more comprehensively, it has a nice, helpful interface. Searching for grid computing yields some interesting results.
After the new year (2007) I will start with regular content. I am still working on adding functionality (mainly two custom search engines: one for grids, one for VMs) but may as well add entries here and there in the meantime.
Read about gridvm.org.
