Random Accesses

With all the recent hoopla about GPU-accelerated HPC, reconfigurable computing with Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) has been getting proportionally less attention. While NVIDIA has led the GPU push in HPC, there is no single vendor in the reconfigurable computing space that has jumped into the driver's seat. That hasn't kept a variety of smaller players from trying.

Unlike GPUs -- or CPUs for that matter -- FPGAs require an unconventional programming model. This stems from the fact that the chip's logic elements must be custom-configured before applications can run on them. This process is accomplished via software, which in this case is used to implement the best-fit hardware design for the application code. This is not something the average programmer is trained to do. Some have likened it to writing assembly code, but it is actually worse that. It's more like designing the assembly language itself.


Source: http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Reconfigurable-Computing-Prospects-on-the-Rise_35498449.html

The US Patent Office recently published two Apple patent filings that reveal the company having researched a unique head-tracking display technology designed to replicate the theater experience.

Noting that watching a fixed view on a screen may be tiring, the company says it has developed a system that would let users mimic an auditorium, a baseball park, a movie theater or other environment by giving them a virtual position in the theater and panning, skewing or stretching the picture to reflect the view.

This positioning could also be used to add in a visual overlay of an audience and to replicate the audio heard in one of these environments; users could even choose from an on-screen menu to mimic a real-world environment such as Fenway Park or Madison Square Garden.

Source: http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/11/06/apple.head.track.patent/

At a major artificial intelligence competition at the University of Reading on 12 October, machines have come close to imitating human communication.

As part of the 18th Loebner Prize, all of the artificial conversational entities (ACEs) competing to pass the Turing Test have managed to fool at least one of their human interrogators that they were in fact communicating with a human rather than a machine. One of the ACEs, the eventual winner of the 2008 Loebner Prize, got even closer to the 30% Turing Test threshold set by 20th-century British mathematician, Alan Turing in 1950, by fooling 25% of human interrogators.

Machines from around the world were entered into the competition and following extensive scrutiny these were whittled down to the five best for the 12 October finale. During the Turing Test at the University of Reading, the ACEs competed in a series of five minute long, unrestricted conversations with human interrogators, attempting to pass themselves off as human. The interrogators did not know whether they were conversing with a human or a machine during the test.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081013112148.htm

Take every man, woman and child on the face of the Earth, cram them into a small room on the University of Massachusetts campus here, and you would not have nearly the computing brain power of Cyclops.

In fact, the university's new $120,000 supercomputer, recently introduced to the public in Marcus Hall, has 608 processors, any one of which can do a better job than all of humankind putting its collective brain power together.

In addition, with a size smaller than some refrigerators, Cyclops takes up considerably less space than all of humanity.

It can perform an estimated 5 billion math operations every second. By comparison, the average human needs about three seconds to perform one large multiplication operation.

Source: http://www.masslive.com/springfield/republican/index.ssf?/base/news-17/1223369649323470.xml&coll=1

The group of companies involved in the development of TransferJet has been tagged the "TransferJet Consortium" and includes many industry giants such as Sony, Canon, Kodak, Nikon, Pioneer, Toshiba, Samsung and many others. The companies intend to market a broad array of products and services incorporating TransferJet technology with the intention of increasing its’ usage through the consumer electronics industry.

With this new technology, there will be no need for access points or complex data transfer setups. By touching the two devices together, intuitive operation will kick in and the files will be transferred automatically. TransferJet does not administer a ‘host to target’ relationship, but rather a ‘peer-to-peer’ connection.

Source: http://thefutureofthings.com/news/1290/touch-me-to-transfer-data.html