What are Supercomputers doing at the moment?

As China joins the list of fastest Supercomputers on the 5th place, it is maybe worth to look at what are the main application areas for the top 500 Supercomputers.

It is always difficult to look at details of major projects run by supercomputers, because there is so much they are doing every second. For example the fastest supercomputer in the world, Jaguar, is able to run 1759 petaflops (1 petaflop = quadrillion operations per second) and has 224,162 processors. From their website it seems that astrophysics (supernova collapse), superconductors and fusion plasmas are top priorities, although other disciplines have reasonable share in Jaguar processing time.

It is hard to find out what research the Chinese supercomputer, Tianjin-1, is going to be used for. They indicated that petroleum exploration and the simulation of large aircraft designs would be major areas. Still, it belongs to The Chinese National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), so...

Now, what about general patterns of application for other remaining 500 supercomputers? Lets take first 6 major ones. While it is 'not specified' what is the application of 117 of them, 78 is used for research, 47 - finance, 34 - information service, 31 - geophysics, 30 - logistic services, 22 - semiconductors. Not bad. The question is - what kind of research (78)? If geophysics or superconductors are there, together with aerospace, medicine and life sciences, this must be cell biology or advanced physics.

Table 1: Supercomputers application area (source: top500.org)

However, things get complicated when we look at segments of market the computers are working for. The leading is industry - using 62.4% of them (312). This is followed by research - 18.2% (91) and academic segment - 15.8% (79). That would indicate (only by subjective correlation) that the majority of 'research' (from the application area table) is done for industry, and therefore have some commercial application. This might be pretty much everything, from new face-scrub recipe and GM crop to design of super-submarine or space craft. However, deeper inquire reveal that massive calculating power is bought by stock market companies for so called 'high-frequency trading' (HFT). In HFT supercomputers make calculations, predictions and decisions by analyzing ongoing flow of data from stock market and test it against historical data. And it all occurs very, very fast - they can handle 10,000 orders per second. HFT is a topic I will discuss on different occasion, some people contribute credit crunch on this strategy, but certainly we live in strange and beautiful times, your company has miliseconds advantage over the others, and it matters, and it already occurs without human intervention - how could it be differently now?

I guess that nicely summarizes the topic - supercomputers are where the money are. And what the do - well, calculate those money ;-)

Table 2: Countries with highest number of supercomputers and number of supercomputers used in different market segments (source: top500.org)

[data source: www.top500.org]
[photo credit: ORLN]

Retro [geek] Corner - F**k iPad - here is $4110 Powerbook!

Today in Retro [geek] Corner, I will present you an ultimate machine that was kicking ass in 1992 - Apple Macintosh Powerbook 180 Laptop (!), which has been recently discovered by Marc in the dungeons and kindly made available to me (thanks Marc!).

When you watched the most recent Keynote from iPad launch, Steve Jobs presented a slide in one moment, showing the first laptop that was ever released (see Photo below). Then it all went down, but lets wait with the full judgment for iPad until I put my hand on this device.


So today we back in time to 1992, with one of the first series of laptops ever released - Powerbook 180. It was worth $4110 (£2635) at the time of release. $4110!!! It had Motorola MC processor running with stunning 33 Mhz, 4MB of RAM, 80 MB of hard drive, and 1.4 Floppy Drive. This 3.1 kilogram gray beauty (Photo) had amazing 10" grayscale LCD screen with maximum 4-bit resolution of 640x400. It had speaker, microphone (all mono), SCSI port, and some other esoteric ports (1 x ADI, 2 x mini DIN-8), and was running Mac OS 7.1, with games like puzzle and... other stuff like Word. It was 5.5 cm thick comparing to 2.5 cm of my 5 years old Macbook Pro (Photo). It was a $4110 gray beast with trackball (Photo) and up to 1 hour of battery life (yeah right;-) with the Apple Rainbow logo (Photo). A nice touch was adjustable stand on the back, allowing to adjust the position of Powerbook (Photo). It was indeed a beautiful machine...

Now, 18 years later, what's different? Well, for around $1000 (£700) (that is quarter of the 1992 Powerbook 180 price) you get white Macbook with 2.26 GHz, 2GB of RAM, 250GB of hard drive, and Superdrive. It weights 2.1 kilos and has 13" LED screen with 1280 x 800 resolution. It also has bluetooth, airport, Ethernet, multitouch track-pad, camera, and 7 hours of battery life.

So for the quarter of the Powerbook 180 price you get a machine that is basically around 300-400 times faster, has 3200 times more storage space, and is basically a portable multimedia studio. Which makes you reflect on how 18 years changed the scope of portable computers. And I am excited about what tomorrow will bring.

Finally, I was thinking - what I could use such machine for? Uh, it wasn't easy to come up with practical application (recycle?), but it could potentially be used as a book-stand or a bookshelf holder (Photo).

Any other suggestions?[photo by Geek On Acid]

Nexus One, Transparent Display, Project Natal and shit loads of touch tablets.

Its the beginning of 2010 and there is a lot of stuff happening in the technology world. Particularly, I have been focusing on Consumer Electronic Association (CES) conference to see if there is anything worth cyberpunk attention.

First - everyone has been hooked on the release of Google Nexus One phone (pictured below), which for me looks really like another iPhone copy. Some specs are better (larger screen, 5 Megapix camera, voice recognition, multitasking), but to be honest - I would expect more from Google. All the internet gossips about Nexus One came true, which was... very disappointing, because it was all so predictable! I really like the fact that you can dictate your SMS's to the Nexus, but I know from experience that as a non-native English speaker, those technologies doesn't work so well for me. Nothing really new there, it is like Google just recycled iPhone. Not impressed at all. However, what has to be admitted is that the real war is not in the hardware but software that matters in mobile phones at the moment. As Mike Harvey reflects in his Times review from yesterday that only Google Android OS is a real candidate to overtake Apple on the mobile market. We shall see how it develops, and what phone we will have in our pocket in a year time...


Second - the cool stuff, is the prototype for Samsung transparent OLED display and 0.05 mm OLED panels (pictured below in the format of window displayed during CES conference). Yes! I was waiting for it! I already see my mobile phone with transparent display scanning the reality around me with augmented labels, or my flat windows being my displays. Also, the perspective of reading a e-newspaper on 0.05 mm display is even more exciting. Ok, maybe I haven't outlined the most practical aspects of this technology (like hmmm... transparent medical body scanner - you know, the one from Aliens) but it still has very high cyberpunk-geek factor for me. It's the kind of stuff from sci-fi movies that comes true. Ah, shame it's still in research and development, no release date yet...


Third - Microsoft Project Natal for 'new' Xbox 360 - finally. 'You Are The Controller' as the advert says - full body gaming interface. I think it was inevitable after Nintendo Wii, but it will finally be here, this year, in your living room. Project Natal is a tiny camera (pictured below), that combines depth sensor, multi-array microphone, and software which provides camera with 3D full body motion capture, face capture, voice recognition, acoustic source localization and ambient noise suppression. So you slash, shot, speak, shout, kick, or jump, and your on-screen gaming character does the same. However, on the CES they didn't actually demoed this device. Microsoft folks just showed cheesy clips of Natal and jumped around excited how amazing it's going to be. Demo please Microsoft, we want proper user demo. Anyway, its coming soon, this summer. I think I will actually buy Xbox just to experience it...


Forth, fifth, sixth... all the other releases are taken by so called 'Slates' or touch tablets. Lenovo Tablet, Dell Tablet, Freescale Tablet, T-Mobile Vega Android Tablet... This year on CES almost every possible company decided to release their own tablet, probably in competitive anticipation for widely-gossiped iSlate (that is supposedly coming soon from Apple). And, I totally agree with my pal from lab, David (who already criticized it here), that tablets don't fill any market gap, and therefore they are useless. Ebook I understand, because I want to read and store journal papers, newspapers and articles on the thin and light device with E-ink display (and they are cheap). Netbook I acknowledge, because I would like to have a light laptop working in the Cloud (and they are cheap). But I don't need a 10" copy of my iPhone with touch LCD or LED screen. Not useful for writing, not useful for reading, shit, it's a retarded technology and it's expensive. Enough for today.

[photo credits: Google, Engaget, Wikipedia]

Reactive Music and Reconnected Reality

I have different soundtracks to everyday world, my iTunes library is filled with playlists for different moods, actions and places.

Those playslists also allow me to escape from the surrounding noise, and therefore from the actual experience of auditory reality that I exist in.

However, I've recently discovered reactive music, the type of music that is shaped by your everyday world sounds.


I have two apps on iPhone: Kids on DSP and RjDj, both based on the same engine - that is to play some pre-recorded samples, but morph and mix them with sounds recorded in real time from microphone placed in the headphones. So the software records sounds that surround you and sample them into a continuously evolving soundtrack. As a result you actually listen to your environment which makes you more connected to reality. Your medium returned you to the world that surrounds you.

It is very crude and simple, it needs to be improved, but I see a type of augmented reality here that works like boomerang, that comes back to you with some upgrade of your actual experience of the moment and the sounds of your surroundings. You don't actually cut yourself from the noise, but you use those sounds to make your music.

So I recorded my trip back from work today using different 'scenes'* from RjDj and Kids on DSP and I managed to make a small album out of it, ;-)

*'scenes' are small programs inside RjDj that control how sound is recorded and sampled with the default sets. Those 'scenes' can be programmed and published for users by anyone who make one.

Geek On Acid: Back From Work
[recorded with RjDj and Kids On DSP]