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At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco recently, NVIDIA announced a GPU-powered 3D Web platform. Called the NVIDIA RealityServer, it consists of Tesla GPUs, rendering software and a Web service environment, all integrated into a platform designed to deliver photorealistic image streams via a cloud computing model. The new offering is yet another example of how the company intends to push its high-end GPUs into CPU territory.

The basic idea behind RealityServer is to do all the heavy computation lifting of image rendering on the server side, such that photorealistic 3D content can be delivered interactively across the Web. That means mass-market devices from smart phones to desktops and everything in between can be used to do high-end imaging.

Applications include architectural design, product design, manufacturing and apparel styling, as well as HPC visual applications in such areas as oil and gas, medical diagnostics, and scientific research. As a result, potential users span the entire population: consumers, artists, product designers, doctors, architects, engineers, and scientists.

Source: http://www.hpcwire.com/features/NVIDIA-Pitches-GPU-Computing-in-the-Cloud-65217572.html

Cisco announced the results of the Cisco® Visual Networking Index (VNI) Forecast and Methodology, 2008-2013 that confirms consumer broadband usage and global IP network traffic continues to climb at an overwhelming pace due to new forms and expanded usage of interactive media, and the explosion of video content across multiple devices. The study projects that global IP traffic will increase fivefold by 2013. There are key consumer and service provider implications to the forecast that compares regions around the globe including North America, Western Europe, AsiaPac, Middle East and more.

Global IP traffic is expected to increase fivefold from 2008 to 2013, approaching 56 exabytes per month in 2013, up from approximately 9 exabytes per month in 2008.

By 2013, annual global IP traffic will reach two-thirds of a zettabyte (or 667 exabytes). (A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes.)

Source: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2009/prod_060909.html

The 3D web moved closer to reality as Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox browser, joined forces with graphics consortium Khronos. Khronos has set up a working group to create a standard for what it calls accelerated 3D graphics on the web.

It could lead to widespread browser-based gaming as well as creating 3D environments in social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

The aim is to produce a first public version within a year.

"For a number of reasons, I think now is the time to .. figure out what an initial take of 3D on the web should look like," said Mozilla's infrastructure engineer Vladimir Vukicevic in his blog.

"People are doing more and more on the web… adding 3D to this mix ensures that current web applications can experiment with new user experiences, while also enabling new classes of web applications," he said.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7963302.stm

Independent security researchers in California and researchers at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands, EPFL in Switzerland, and Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in the Netherlands have found a weakness in the Internet digital certificate infrastructure that allows attackers to forge certificates that are fully trusted by all commonly used web browsers.

As a result of this weakness it is possible to impersonate secure websites and email servers and to perform virtually undetectable phishing attacks, implying that visiting secure websites is not as safe as it should be and is believed to be. By presenting their results at the 25C3 security congress in Berlin on the 30th of December, the experts hope to increase the adoption of more secure cryptographic standards on the Internet and therewith increase the safety of the internet,

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-12/epfd-euw123008.php

According to a study by the University of California at Berkeley, traditional search engines such as Google and Yahoo index only about 0.2% of the Internet. The remaining 99.8%, known as the "deep Web," is a vast body of public and subscription-based information that traditional search engines can't access.

To dig into this "invisible" information, scientists have developed a new search engine called Infovell geared at helping researchers find often obscure data in the deep Web. As scientists working on the Human Genome Project, Infovell´s founders designed the new searching technology based on methods in genomics research. Instead of using keywords, Infovell accepts much longer search terms, and in any language.

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news140110066.html