GEnerally speaking supercomputers are designed for a particular domain or specific application only , say for weather forecasting or miniral exploration or astrophysics. Supercomputing is employed where a multitude of calculations are involved which needs to be completed in a specified period of time.
Recently DARPA financed CRAY $250 million for research in adaptive supercomputing project. So what is this adaptive supercomputing? Adaptive supercomputing involves setting up of multi-functional or general purpose computing in a HPC ( High Performance Supercomputing ) environment. The computing platform consists of different kinds of microprocessors like general purpose chip and others like multithreaded, FPGA, vector processor et al. There is software platform which makes the task of choosing a particular or group of processors based on the specific requirements giving the application developer a level of abstraction to work on.
Other players in the field of HPC are IBM,HP,SGI etc. So CRAY is a pioneer in adaptive technology.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Artificial Intelligence
Not long back people used to scorn at the pace at which AI systems were developing but no longer. REcent advances in artificial intelligence is keeping stride with the expectations of the users.
An artificial intelligence system is one which is composed of parallel microprocessing systems which try to mimic human thinking. Although the simulation of human neral systems is nowhere near the capability ofthe real human brain but it is nearing that stage. Right now a newtwork of processors can be trained using real time data or bayesian inference in the absence of data to study the patterns in the data and draw meaningful information and learning from the system.
AI among other applications are also finding applications in the Enterprise Application space namely, BI, Data Mining, SCM and CRM. More on this in future posts.
An artificial intelligence system is one which is composed of parallel microprocessing systems which try to mimic human thinking. Although the simulation of human neral systems is nowhere near the capability ofthe real human brain but it is nearing that stage. Right now a newtwork of processors can be trained using real time data or bayesian inference in the absence of data to study the patterns in the data and draw meaningful information and learning from the system.
AI among other applications are also finding applications in the Enterprise Application space namely, BI, Data Mining, SCM and CRM. More on this in future posts.
Saturday, January 06, 2007
Spintronics
Spintronics is the science of Electron spin and its manipulation for productive purposes. Spintronics is already at work in the hard disks of your I-Pod, Notepad , and other hand held devices. They give huge storage capacity to the hard disk.
How does it work. See traditionally chips handled digital storage by storing a charge or not in a semiconductor. o/1 mechanism. After 50 years of stagnancy there is a shift in the technology. What is that shift . Let me explain. Now the spin of electron is being used to store information. THis has applications in Hard Disk, MRAM and Microprocessors.
The advantage of using spintronics is that the polarised electron retians its stage for a much longer time compared to a charge and hense results in a reduction in power consumption requirement. Also if used in RAM ( MRAM) it results in non volatile memory and hense instant boot. MRAM would soon be available. Also soon microchips would be available which would run 100 times faster in even smaller chips.
How does it work. See traditionally chips handled digital storage by storing a charge or not in a semiconductor. o/1 mechanism. After 50 years of stagnancy there is a shift in the technology. What is that shift . Let me explain. Now the spin of electron is being used to store information. THis has applications in Hard Disk, MRAM and Microprocessors.
The advantage of using spintronics is that the polarised electron retians its stage for a much longer time compared to a charge and hense results in a reduction in power consumption requirement. Also if used in RAM ( MRAM) it results in non volatile memory and hense instant boot. MRAM would soon be available. Also soon microchips would be available which would run 100 times faster in even smaller chips.
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