IHPCRC Photo

The Iranian computer research center (IHPCRC) in Tehran claims to have built a supercomputer out of AMD's Opteron processors. It is a Linux-based system with 216 Opteron processing cores which is able to deliver peak performance level of 860 billion floating-point operations per second.

This is remarkable because the United States has imposed federal antiterrorism trade regulations that strictly prohibit the sale of any computer technology built in US or by US companies to Iran.

When Tehran's Amirkabir University of Technology posted the announcement on their webpage they also posted the above photo which shows stacks of shiping boxes from the United Arab Emirates where Thacker/Sky Electronics is located who is one of AMD's biggest authorized distributors.

The photo was quickly removed.

Link to the Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center (IHPCRC)

Courtesy Honda


Honda Research 3D CPU (to power the Asimo Robot)
Courtesy Honda

From the Honda Research website:

"The architecture of the brain is completely different from current computer systems. The ultimate brain-like computer will appear most likely with very specialized hardware. We will clearly build and explain its architecture by developing hypothetical brain models in parallel to creating potential hardware. We will then evaluate its interactive intelligence in a real world situation.

Brain-Machine Interface (BMI) – BMI is a new interface concept utilizing brain activities to control machines. To understand BMI, we will focus on the non-invasive measurement and decoding of natural brain activities that accompanies human states such as recognition, emotion, intention and motion. The anticipated results will provide fundamental novel man-machine communication technologies and novel algorithms for brain-like computing.

Human-Robot Interaction – Despite recent technological development of intelligent robots in areas such as speech, image, environmental understanding and behavior control, we are still far from building robots that can naturally, robustly, and adaptively interact with humans in real world situations. We are pursuing a novel intelligence model that will integrate individual technologies and learning techniques to achieve such human-robot interactions."

Link to Honda Research

Courtesy SONY


Courtesy SONY

In Japan, SONY has announced its latest fuel cell. It is a device which does not use the more traditional ethanol or methanol, but instead it uses glucose extracted from fruit juice and sports drinks.

In a posted video, the four-cell device can be seen powering speakers attached to a Network Walkman. The fuel cell is filled with a squirt of juice extract as a power source. Also a small fan is powered using the sugar in a Gatorade-type sports drink.

According to SONY, enzymes break down the glucose, allowing the "Bio Battery" to generate an amazing 50mW of power.

Link to the SONY press release

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin will unveil Ranger, the world’s most powerful supercomputer that is available for non-classified scientific research. With a peak performance of 504 teraflops, Ranger is 50,000 times more powerful than today’s PCs, and five times more capable than any open-science computer available to the national science community.

“Ranger is an incredible asset for The University of Texas at Austin, for the national scientific community and for society as a whole,” William Powers Jr., President of The University of Texas at Austin, said. “That the National Science Foundation has entrusted us with this vital scientific instrument for research is a testament to the expertise of the staff at TACC, who are among the most innovative leaders in high performance computing.”

Ranger is the biggest HPC computing resource on the NSF TeraGrid, a nationwide network of academic HPC centers that provides scientists and researchers access to large-scale computing power and resources. With the ability to model complex systems on a scale never accessible before, scientists and engineers across all fields are expecting considerable advancements that will expand the research universe and solve “grand challenge” questions affecting the world.

“Ranger is so much more powerful than anything that’s come before it for open science research,” Jay Boisseau, director of TACC, said. “It will be the first time researchers in many disciplines will be able to conduct simulations they have been planning in some cases for many years.”

Ranger will provide more than 500 million processor hours of computing time to the science community, performing more than 200,000 years of computational labor over its four-year life span.

Funded through the National Science Foundation (NSF) “Path to Petascale” program, Ranger is a collaboration among TACC, The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Computational Engineering and Science (ICES), Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, Arizona State University and Cornell University. The $59 million award, which covers the $30 million system and four years of operating costs, was announced in fall 2006. The investment marks NSF’s renewed dedication to leadership-class high-performance computing.

Ranger is housed at UT's J.J. Pickle Research Campus in North Austin and along with TACC, will provide the opportunity for university and national research communities to operate wide-ranging superior computing resources and services that allow meticulous research. TACC’s mission is to enable scientific discovery and enhance society through the application of advanced computing technologies.

Link to the Texas Advanced Comuting Center (TACC)

Courtesy Intel


Courtesy Intel

Intel's Fab 68 will join seven other Intel mega-plants in the world which will be capable of producing Intel 300mm wafers when it opens in 2010.

The new semiconductor plant will only produce chipsets in the initial phases. Actual microprocessors will not be produced in China at this time.

That was a key criteria that won the US government approval for the plant.

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