Ha ha. found someone mentioning this on Twitter… Wikipedia reckons our ears can detect semen. I’ll give it a skip thanks.
keywords: funny, googleArchive for the ‘Random’ Category
14
Jan 10
17
Dec 09
Worlds Fastest Supercomputer
(Credit: Image courtesy of the National Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
As announced on 13 November 2009, the Cray XT5 supercomputer known as Jaguar, knocked out the previous world number 1, IBM’s “Roadrunner”. This amazingly powerful supercomputer, built only this year boasts amazing speeds and processing power. The Jaguar’s theoretical processing peak is said to be 2.3 petaflops per second (that’s 2.3 quadrillion calculations per second!)
Some stats:
Processor AMD x86_64 Opteron Six Core 2600 MHz (10.4 GFlops)
Operating System : Cray Linux Environment
Site: Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Compute Cores: 224,162
Each compute nodes contains two hex-core AMD Opteron processors, 16GB memory, and a SeaStar 2+ router.
Let’s take a look at the latest list of supercomputers according to their rank:
- Jaguar, Cray (1.759 petaflop/s, 224,162 cores)
- Roadrunner, IBM (1.042 petaflop/s, 122,400 cores)
- Kraken XT5, Cray (831.70 teraflop/s, 98,928 cores)
- JUGENE, IBM (825.50 teraflop/s, 29,4912 cores)
- Tianhe-1, NUDT (563.10 teraflop/s, 71,680 cores)
- Pleiades, SGI (544.30 teraflop/s, 56,320 cores)
- BlueGeneL, IBM (478.20 teraflop/s, 212,992 cores)
- BlueGene/P, IBM (458.61 teraflop/s, 163,840 cores)
- Ranger, Sun (433.20 teraflop/s, 6,276 cores)
- Red Sky, Sun (423.90 teraflop/s, 41,616 cores)
keywords: jaguar, supercomputer
12
Dec 09
Wireless electricity has arrived!
Yup, you read right. Wireless electricity has arrived. I’m sure many of you have screamed and yelled due to electrical cords at some point. Hell, I’ve even been blown away across a room a few times in my life due these tangling annoyances. Well there is soon to be no need for them!
We have taken our time to perfect this new method of simplifying our lives, seeing as though Nikola Tesla already managed to achieve this in 1894 whereby he wirelessly lit up single-terminal incandescent lamps in New York City by means of electrodynamic induction aka wireless resonant inductive coupling.
Manufacturers of this new technology have released a device that can send power through the air over a distance of up to a few inches. A magnetic field is created inside the device by a powered coil which in turn induces current to flow to the small secondary coil built into any device that has it. Simply put your phone, camera or laptop on the device and let it charge wirelessly – no more messy wires or wire pulling (really?)
Don’t worry about being frizzled to ashes either, because this technology is “smart”, or so they say! Their built-in coils are driven by integrated circuits which pick up if the device on it is able to receive power or not. So you won’t get a nasty suprise every time you walk passed it.
Image taken from http://www.itnetwerk.com/
keywords: future, nikola tesla, wireless electricity, wirelessly charge12
Dec 09
Nanotechnology helps create bendable, ultra-lightweight batteries
Nanotechnology advances have already amazed the world but it’s only the beginning. The latest to come out of the nanotech industry are ultra-lightweight, bendable batteries and superconductors.
Scientists, namely Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University have discovered a way to make these amazing batteries by simply coating a sheet of paper with ink made of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires.
Cui mentions how special these nanomaterials are. He mentions that these nanomaterials are one-dimensional, having very small diameters. These small diameters help the nanomaterial ink stick to the paper thus making the battery and supercapacitator durable and can have a charge-discharge cycle of around 40 000 times. The nanomaterials also help conduct electricty much more efficiently than ordinary conductors.
Being a paper supercapacitator, there can be many applications whereby this new technology can be used. Such as storing energy from solar energy systems and wind farms at very low costs or electric and hybrid cars that require quick transfer of electricity.
Soon enough we may be able to paint our houses with super conductive nano-ink and not have to worry about where the electric plugs are in the house – your house will just be one big plug itself.
keywords: future, nanotechnology5
Dec 09
What comes after a Yottabyte?
1024 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte
1024 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte
1024 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte
1024 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte
1024 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte
1024 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte
1024 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte
1024 Zettabyte = 1 Yottabyte
What comes after 1 Yottabyte? Well, there have been some proposals put forward for the following, and apparently a decision should have been made this year in order to finalize these terms:
1024 Yottabytes = 1 Brontobyte
1024 Brontobytes = 1 Geobyte
1024 Geobytes = 1 Zotzabyte
According to CSIRO, in the next decade, astronomers expect to be processing 10 petabytes of data every hour from the Square Kilometre Array telescope. The telescope is expected to generate around 1 exabyte of data every four days. According to Cisco, annual global IP traffic for 2013 is estimated to be around 667 exabytes. With augmented reality on its way and a number of other exciting things, I’m estimating global IP traffic to be around a couple 100 Zotzabytes by 2018.
keywords: brontobyte, future, geobyte, yottabyte, zotzabyte
