eerpini

There is an animation further down that shows the magnetic field generated by the sun when it is a dipole. Apparently the 3-d wave like pattern better shields from cosmic rays originating outside the solar system.

I am not sure if DoorDash's IPO price is more than it should be, but value creation (which is "real" in my view) need not always result in immediate profits and the stock market tends to be forward looking in general. How exactly are Apple, Google, Tesla and for that matter even Uber vaporware companies ? Some of them might be overvalued (by a large margin), but they still have real value in this world.

That last link on the shortcomings of most predictions based on statistical analysis was a great read. Thanks for sharing.

anyone remember Gattaca ? well we could end up with data based classification version of that here !

Yes memory access patterns seem to be the most common bottleneck for most parallel code. I was implementing a parallel version of quick sort recently and I have similar stories to tell. Optimize the code to avoid cache misses frequently and you end up getting a near optimal speedup.

Well my friend, here are a few things you should know: 1. If you are interested in research, you should approach professors/find out what they are doing etc, even at the worst of schools, there is always someone doing something worthwhile. 2. As it looks like you are already following hacker news, keeping up to the posts on the front page itself should give you a lot of ideas and things to tinker around with. 3. Believe me, undergrad education is useless, everyone does it to get a degree. What really matters is the environment around. The people around you will help you learn more at school than the course itself does. 4. Ask yourself these simple questions, if the answer is a "no", try working towards making it a "yes" : Do you have a GITHUB Account ? Have you tried getting your hands dirty with any OSS project ? (not necessarily code, configuration ? testing ?) Do you follow journals in your area of Interest ? Which courses do you love at school ? Have you supplemented the course with some extra reading ?

These are just a few questions that can get you started, for example, the course for algorithms/data structures at most schools in india sucks big time, why not follow it up with a reading of AOCP or the MIT algorithms book. And yes as someone already mentioned, concentrating on work rather than cribbing about the system will take you better places. BTW, I did my undergrad from a so called "reputed private university" in India too.

Where are these packages being shipped from ?

Truth and Beauty (Aesthetics and Motivations in Science) by S. Chandrasekhar I got to know of this book much later than I would have preferred !

totally agree, I just reposted this here because I thought this article at LWN gave a lot more details than the previous ones.

amazing, the ability and affordability to do such things will at least finally reiterate the need for better security !

yeah, X was developed with the server-client model in view and the scenario of the web currently fits in well with this type of thinking, so no wonder !

The performance is measured with LinPack which mostly does FP operations and is optimized to run on the architecture, when normal programs are run, it is tough to run them at full utilization, this is because, a lot of time might be spent in data transfer or I/O apart from the computation ... there would be various other factors !

that is still unbelievable ... they sure have more cores than that just in EC2, and anyway looks like the new GPU instance offerings were not included in the benchmarking, that would have shot the rank up by an order of magnitude !

mostly the problems with utilizing the system completely are the same ones a common programmer faces when trying to use GPUs for general purpose programming, the problem of transferring the data to be handled from the main memory to the GPU's memory. Though Tianhe-1A has a very high peak performance, the sustained performance seems to be comparatively low !

well that is easier said than done, all the machines on the amazon cluster are machines with common architecture and traditional interconnects, most of these supercomputers have a custom architecture( here I mean just the type of processors and the inter processor connect on the same node) and interconnect, the cost of running programs on these machines would outweigh their usability for the cloud.

yes, they seem to be using the Power 7 architecture by IBM , which is quite energy efficient compared to most other architectures, and also they are planning to use UPC(Unified Parallel C) or similar languages for applications running on the system, that a good step towards better usability. But that does not matter as a super computer is always(mostly) used by a small group of highly qualified scientists.

lol and the system goes live in 2012, close to the doomsday prediction !

I quite did not understand what "waking" up means, but it seems that Blue waters will indeed have a sustained performance of more than a petaflop with adapted applications !