Rest in Peace, Steve. You have been an inspiration, an original innovator. Thanks for the good things you did for us..
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
My first C/C++ learning environment – Quincy
30
Oct
When I was about to start learning C programming back in college many years ago, I took a peek at what was about to come my way. I had some issues understanding the ‘cryptic’ syntax. I was familiar with Turbo BASIC from Borland Corp and could program quite well in it. I started looking around for some good book to learn C. I found a very nice book named ‘Al Stevens Teaches C’, it was an interactive tutorial that accompanied a C interpreter with it. This is the same Al Stevens who used to write great articles in Dr. Dobb’s journal. I enjoyed the way he took me through the core concepts and simplified approach to C syntax. The interpreter allowed very quick testing of the code I produced and it was pure fun.
You might be thinking why a post on such an old thing, well the interpreter created by Al was special, I loved it and I have recently been looking for it. I didn’t find the original text based version, but I was able to locate a newer GUI version that runs on windows or WINE on top of Linux. This specific version was produced in 2005 and works like a breeze. Its not an interpreter anymore. It is now more of an IDE built around the GNU C compiler. Its something nice for those who wish to No need for those bulky commercial compilers for newbies anymore, just get your hands on Quincy and get on with your learning with the power of open source.
By the way, I must mention that Quincy was named after the adorable cat of the author of the book, I wonder if the cat still lives? You’ll find a photo of her in the program logo.
You can download Quincy from this link.
http://www.uploadmb.com/dw.php?id=1255959978
More information can be found at http://quincy.codecutter.org
CMOS Fuel Cells?
16
Oct
A German microchip vendor Micronas AG has come up with something revolutionary. It is a chip that contains 42 micro fuel cells integrated on it. It ws created in collaboration with University of Freibur, Germany.
The power generated is regulated at a nominal voltage of 3.3volts by a regulating circuit that is powered by 4 additional fuel cells on chip. With a lifetime of about one year at nominal load in the triple-digit microwatt range, the device could eventually power smart autonomous systems in applications where no conventional power source is available. In the lead research scientist of the university Mr. Hoffmann’s view, energy harvesting devices and the chip-level fuel cell are not mutually competitive, but can instead be regarded as complimentary technologies, For instance, the fuel cell could be used as a power buffer for periods when energy harvesting methods don’t generate enough power.
An article detailing the research and device can be found here.
NVIDIA® Tesla™ C1060 Computing Processor
19
Jul
If you remember the long gone legendary parallel computing elements known as Transputers, behold.. they have been revived.. 
nVidia have come up with a supercomputing processor that plugs into a PCI-Express slot and gives your computer an astonishing performance capability of more than 933 GFLOPS. It contains a massively parallel 240 core GPU that allows it to achieve such performance at a clock speed of around 1.2GHz.
The NVIDIA® Tesla™ C1060 computing processor board is a PCI Express 2.0 fullheight
(4.376 inches by 10.50 inches) form factor computing add-in card based on
the NVIDIA Tesla T10 graphics processing unit (GPU). This board is targeted as
high-performance computing (HPC) solution for PCI Express systems.
The Tesla C1060 is capable of 933 GFLOPs/s of processing performance and
comes standard with 4 GB of GDDR3 memory at 102 GB/s bandwith.
To add more firepower to your personal super computer, ASUS P6T7 WS Supercomputer motherboard provides 7 PCI express 2.0 slots, so you can actually accomodate as many Teslas in it as your pocket allows.
This amazing feat has been made possible through the groundbreaking computing architecture termed as CUDA by nVidia. CUDA allows a variable number of comoute cores in the system and thus permits extreme scalability to 240 cores and beyond.
The image below shows the CUDA architecture..
Intel Parallel Studio Beta Available Now
30
Jan
Until recently, parallelism was used for technical and high performance computing (HPC), but was not critical for most desktop/client applications. But today, as businesses and consumers invest in multicore hardware, demand is growing for software that takes advantage of these new processor core capabilities.
Parallelism is simply the ability to perform multiple functions simultaneously. Without hardware support for parallelism available in Intel® multicore processors—there was little or no benefit to writing parallel programs. Now, Intel brings 25 years of parallelism experience in high performance computing to more developers with products that complement and extend Microsoft Visual Studio* for parallelism.
Intel® Parallel Studio includes Parallel Composer, Parallel Inspector, and Parallel Amplifier, providing the most comprehensive set of development tools for parallelism. Below is a brief description of each of these components.
Developers who will benefit most from Intel Parallel Studio software products are:
• C/C++ developers who are driven by schedules to include new features and functions in their software releases
• Developers who want to take advantage of multicore, but are concerned about supporting software on multiple generations of microprocessors and multiple releases of Microsoft Windows.
Read the rest of this entry »
Intel Core i7
23
Nov
Intel Core i7 Logo
Intel has come up with a promising new core design that does a few very innovative things. It is the fastest desktop x86 processor available today. It has made this feat possible via the following.
1. It eliminates the notorious FSB (front side bus) and the bottlenecks caused by it.
2. It makes use of three channel DDR3 RAM, the memory controller is on the processor die.
3. The cores are intelligently over-clockable by upto 400MHz. So the performance hungry applications can get extra CPU cycles when needed the most.
4. Ensures greener computing by switching off idle cores when they are idle. Read the rest of this entry »
Hifn 5NP4G Network Processor
07
Sep
We are all quite choosey when it comes to buying a PC or a Laptop.. Did you ever think what powers your router or wireless access point? I remember being stunned to find out what powered my trusted CISCO 2500 series router It was a Motorola 68030 CISC processor. Far behind the state of the art processors that were available at the time the 2500 was created. But, to be fair, routing devices don’t really need super computing performance when it comes to the central processor. Recently, we have been seeing some brave architectural innovations featuring ASICs and Network processors & co-processors.
Hifn have created a first of its kind Network Processor 5NP4G. The 5NP4G is a programmable network processor optimized for packet processing at speeds up to OC-48. The 5NP4G implements copper interconnect technology and integrates a switching engine, search engine, frame processors, and multiplexed MACS. Designed to satisfy enterprise, core, edge networking, and Internet service requirements at wire speed, the 5NP4G network processor can deliver complex functions, such as (QoS), scheduling, flow control, and differentiated services.
TreeMark™ Tree Rating – A fresh perspective to green computing
31
Aug
Recently, we have been seeing lots of energy-efficient products entering our lives, the change has been triggered by factors like rising oil prices, increase in environmental pollution and soaring electricity costs. There has been a significant shift towards energy efficient computers, especially in the data centers.
Centaur Technology have come up with a very interesting way of evaluating the energy efficiency of micoprocessor products. It is called the TreeMark™ Tree Rating. Centaur defines it as “The number of trees that need to be planted to counter the amount of carbon dioxide created as a by-product of the electricity generated to power the processor over its operational lifetime”. The good thing is, Centaur’s processors rate very well on this benchmark when compared with their Intel or AMD counterparts. Read the rest of this entry »
Cuil – The Elegant Search Engine
15
Aug
I stumbled upon http://www.cuil.com while browsing for some high-tech stuff. Believe me, it made me forget what I was looking for. An excellent user interface combined with very intelligent search semantics, very impressive indeed. I was amazed at the relevance of the results. Although the number of results shown at once is lesser than the contemporary search engines, it makes up for it by ensuring two things. First, the search results are extremely relevant: Second, the search results carry tabs for each of the related possible suggestions, the user may effortlessly click any of the tabs to get results for that tab. Cuil is a brain child of Anna Patterson and Tom Costello. It has been designed to be the largest search engine on the web.
The two features, namely faceted drilldown and tabbed search for related terms are shown in the figures below. Read the rest of this entry »