Techno Musings

In case you missed it the second fastest super computer in the world is based on hybrid compute technology.   It incorporates Intel and NVidia processors to achieve extreme scale and performance.  If you look at the number of cores, 120640,  you will see that it has a little more than half of the number [...]

There is an article on Forbes.com talking about moving beyond Moore’s law.  It is written by the chief scientist of NVidia, so there may be obvious marketing reasons for it being published, but that does not mean the theory of hybrid or many-core computing is not a real thing.  Already my colleagues Ken Wood (HDS) [...]

There seems to be a general move afoot for the entire IT sector to standardize on the x86-64 processor architecture.  Examples include Cray and SGI who use x86-64 from AMD and Intel respectively.  In essence these two companies that used to make their own processors have stopped.  (Further HP no longer makes the PA-RISC processor, [...]

Well IBM recently pushed out a new chip and several new systems that make use of the beastie.  Of course there is the discussion about how this stacks up against Intel’s latest Itanium processor and the soon to come Nehalem octo-core processor.  However, there are a couple of points that I want to bring to [...]

Okay, okay I cannot help myself I have to write about the iPad from Apple. The first thing is that I want to point out is that there is some cool Hitachi technology in the iPad display called IPS or in-plane switching.  IPS enables the user to better view images on the screen at extreme [...]

Most recently in the news was Apple’s choice to open source some of the core technology behind Grand Central Dispatch in Snow Leopard.  This is not some automatic tool to remove the difficulty when thinking in parallel, instead it is a step along the way to improve developers’ ability in diagnosing their code that has [...]

As a part of ongoing architecture discussions, the concept of commodity has come up.  First I would like to start with a few questions on the point.
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An article over at Infoworld brings up again something that I’ve talked about in reference to BlueArc: thinking in parallel.  The old adage about chewing, gum, walking, holding a conversation and trying to do a math problem roughly gets to why this is a challenging task.  (I’m going to get a bit esoteric here so [...]