With a $25,000 price tag, CX1 marks the first time Cray uses Intel chips

Think of supercomputers and you tend to think of multimillion dollar machines that easily take up a football field — with miles and miles of cabling and cooling systems running beneath the floors.

That’s long been generally true, but not anymore.

Supercomputer maker Cray Inc. today announced that it teamed up with Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp. to produce a desktop supercomputer. That’s right. It will sit on a desktop. And maybe just as surprising, it has a starting price of $25,000.

The Cray CX1 supercomputer uses up to eight nodes and 16 Intel Xeon processors — either dual-core or quad-core. It’s the first Cray machine to use Intel processors. The CX1 has up to 4 terabytes of internal storage and 64GB of memory per node. The machine also comes preinstalled with Windows HPC Server 2008 and interoperates with Linux.

“Rather than constantly pushing upwards and out, here’s someone pushing down onto the desktop with a supercomputer,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst at the Enderle Group. “We could find that existing [Cray supercomputer] customers will buy these to do work on a $25,000 machine to free up space on their $25 million supercomputer. It could help them balance their load.”

According to Cray, studies by the Council on Competitiveness and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) found that many organizations and departments in large firms that could use supercomputers were locked out by the high cost and a lack of in-house experts to run them. According to Cray, the CX1 was designed from the ground-up to tackle these problems.

“IDC research shows that HPC has been one of the highest-growth IT markets during the past five years and the segment for HPC systems priced below $100,000 is headed for continued growth,” said Earl Joseph, IDC’s HPC program vice president, in a statement.

By comparison, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, the IBM-built Roadrunner, carries a price tag of approximately $120 million. Run at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the hybrid system runs AMD Opteron processors and Cell chips, and this summer sustained a speed of 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. That’s about twice as fast as the next-fastest supercomputer, IBM’s BlueGene/L, which is based at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Cray did not release performance specs on the CX1.

Source: Computer World

By Michael Garfield – The High Tech Texan ®

Back it up. If you haven’t made a backup of your crucial data, do so now. It’s a good idea to make a second backup that moves your data offsite — either to online storage, or to a secure, physical location. If you are evacuating a coastal home, consider removing the hard drives from your PCs and taking them with you, stored in plastic bags and protected from physical shock.

Write it down. If you don’t have power, but can get online from another location, make sure you have your various passwords so you can check e-mail and e-commerce accounts.

Move it up. Got a desktop computers on the floor under a desk? Move it up onto the desk. Do the same with any electronics, including surge protectors and uninterruptible power supplies.

Unplug it. When lightning starts flashing around you, don’t just turn off your electronics — unplug them. A surge protector won’t do much against a direct lightning strike, and even a UPS isn’t a guarantee against damage. In fact, move the devices’ plugs as far away from the outlets as you can. A direct strike can cause electricity to arc between the outlet and the nearby plug’s prongs.

Disconnect it. In addition to unplugging from electrical outlets, also unplug any phone and cable connections. It’s also not a bad idea to disconnect the cables between computers on a home network.

Charge it. Make sure your notebook computer and cell phone batteries are fully charged, just as you’ll want to keep your car’s gas tank filled. Of course, if you’re without power, you may not have broadband Internet access, either. In that case, make a note now of the nearby public libraries, which might have power while you don’t, and may have Wi-Fi available.

Have an alternative way to charge your cell phone, such as a car charger, a solar charger or a battery powered cell phone charger. Another option is a power inverter which plugs into your car’s cigarette lighter and allows you to plug in an electronic device.

Cover it. In a really bad storm with high winds that could damage roofs and allow water to enter your home, consider covering your electronics in plastic. Move them to a central location of your home and off the floor. This may be good advice even in a tropical storm, which can still spawn tornadoes, even if the storm’s sustained winds aren’t that bad.

After the storm

Dry it out. If your home took in any water during the storm, wait several days before plugging in electronics. Plugging a computer into a wet outlet can be devastating. Test outlets first by plugging something expendable into them, such as a table lamp, before trying your electronics.

Text to get through. Cellular networks will most likely be overloaded and many calls may not be able to go through. Text messages are easier to be sent and delivered as they take up much less data on the network plus you can see if the message has been sent.

Keep unplugged until power is on. Just because the storm has passed does not mean your electronics are safe. If your power is not on keep your gadgets unplugged so when power does return nothing can be damaged due to a potential surge.

Email, post or blog if possible. Letting family and friends know you are safe is important. If you can’t get cell or text service, try to find a friend, library or local business with a computer or Internet connection. Send at least one email to a friend or relative letting them know your status or post a message on a blog or social network like Twitter, Facebook or MySpace.

If your cell phone has a camera, use it to take “before” and “after” pictures of your valuables for inventory and insurance purposes. If your property gets damaged, use your phone or digital camera to document the damage. You could also upload pictures from your cell phone or a digital camera to an online photo site such as Flickr or Snapfish. If your property gets damaged, use your phone or digital camera to document the damage.

For media interviews, please contact Michael Garfield

www.hightechtexan.com

Of all the possible things that can come between spouses, you can now add BlackBerrys — or more precisely — BlackBerry addiction to the list.

A new study reveals BlackBerry’s are becoming — among other things — the 800-pound gorilla in the bedroom.

‘Berry, ‘Berry, addictive?

“I live with it. I can’t live without it,” one New York City resident told CBS 2 HD.

Yeah … there’s a reason some call ‘em … CrackBerrys.

But are you having a love affair with yours?

“I am on my BlackBerry more than I see my boyfriend,” one woman said.

The study of 6,500 traveling executives says 35 percent of them would choose their PDA over their spouse.

“That’s a tough call,” one said.

“Oh you don’t want to go there,” another added.

And apparently that attitude is being seen in the sack. Of those polled, 87 percent said they bring their devices into the bedroom.

Another 84 percent check their e-mails just before they go to sleep. Another 80 percent check them in the morning as soon as they get up.

“It can actually ruin relationships,” said Dr. Susan Bartell, a psychologist and relationship expert. Bartell said couples should be interfacing more, but with each other.

“People are so focused on their PDAs, they’re not focusing on what might be going wrong in their relationships,” Bartell said.

Of those polled, 62 percent said they love their blackberry or PDA, and most of them said it makes their life more productive. However, experts suggest, for the sake of your relationship, you might occasionally …

“Turn it off, spend some time with your partner. Have a real relationship with a living human being,” Bartell said.

The study was done by Sheraton hotels. Among its other findings: More than three quarters of those polled say their gadgets give them more quality time with friends and family… and help them enjoy life more.

Source: WCBS New York

As the Hurricane Ike moves inland over Missouri and Illinois today prompting flood warnings, the lives of over two million people have come to a standstill.

Though, the storm weakened to a tropical depression as it came ashore on Galveston Island, the local authorities said they will take some time to get electricity restored in all the affected areas, said Mike Rodgers, a spokesman for Entergy Texas, the primary electricity provider between Houston and the Louisiana border.

Giant hurricane Ike has left Houston without Internet, phone lines, drinking water and severed power to millions after ripping through the fourth-largest city yesterday,

Rodgers said damage to the electric grid was much more widespread than after Hurricane Rita, which hit the area in 2005.

Ike, the first hurricane to hit a major US metropolitan area since Katrina in 2005, has affected 2.3 million people in two states before making landfall at 2.10 am on Saturday.

With wind gusts approaching 100 miles per hour, the 600-mile-wide Category 2 hurricane peeled sheets of steel off skyscrapers here, smashed bus shelters and blew out windows leaving the Houston and its coastal areas in debris.

In Orange, Tex, near the Louisiana coast, the sea rose so rapidly that people were forced to flee to attics and roofs, and the city used trucks to rescue them, local police said.

There were reports of as many as four people killed, but it could take days to search flooded homes to assess the full impact of the storm, officials said.

Source: Business Standard

Texas Instruments commemorated the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit with the opening Friday of Kilby Labs, honoring Jack Kilby, the Nobel-prize-winning inventor of the seminal electronic device.

As a new TI employee in 1958, Kilby was forced to work during the traditional company summer vacation. During that time, he built the first integrated circuit, now the basic building block of everything from 3G cell phones to supercomputers.

The first IC was crude: a sliver of germanium with protruding wires glued to a glass slide (see image below). When Kilby applied electricity to the circuit, “an unending sine wave undulated across his oscilloscope screen. In that instant…he had successfully integrated all of the parts of an electronic circuit onto a single device made from the same semiconductor material,” according to TI’s Web site.

Robert Noyce, who co-founded Intel, also created an integrated circuit, about six months after Kilby. At that time, Noyce was at Fairchild Semiconductor (which he also co-founded). Noyce’s chip, made of silicon, overcame some practical problems that Kilby’s germanium-based device did not.

Kilby won the inventor’s “Triple Crown”: the Nobel Prize in physics; the National Medal of Science; and the National Medal of Technology. He held more than 60 patents including one for the portable electronic calculator, which TI invented in 1967. He died in 2005 at the age of 81 after a battle with cancer.

Kilby Labs will be located on TI’s Dallas North Campus, where Kilby first designed the chip. The new facility will bring together university researchers and leading TI engineers to discover new ways to use the IC–”from creating new ways to make health care more mobile to harnessing new power sources to enabling more fuel-efficient vehicles,” TI said.

TI has named Ajith Amerasekera as director of the labs. Amerasekera, who is a TI fellow, joined the company in 1991 and holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and physics.

At TI’s headquarters, the original lab where Kilby worked and made his discovery of the first integrated circuit has been re-created on-site. TI has also made a donation toward Jack Kilby’s memorial statue in his hometown of Great Bend, Kan.

Hurricane Ike barreled into the densely populated Texas coast near Houston early on Saturday, bringing with it a wall of water and ferocious winds and rain that flooded large areas along the Gulf of Mexico and paralyzed the fourth-largest U.S. city.

Ike, which has idled more than a fifth of U.S. oil production, came ashore at the barrier island city of Galveston as a strong Category 2 storm at 2:10 a.m. CDT (3:10 a.m. EDT) with 110 mph winds, the National Hurricane Center said.

Ike barreled through the Gulf of Mexico for days and covered a vast area extending hundreds of miles (km) when it slammed into the Texas coast. It is the biggest storm to hit a U.S. city since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005.

The hurricane drove a wall of water over Galveston and submerged a 17-foot sea wall built to protect the city after a 1900 hurricane killed at least 8,000 people. More than half of its 60,000 residents had fled and emergency operations were suspended through the storm.

About 50 miles inland, Ike lashed downtown Houston’s glass-covered skyscrapers, blowing out windows and sending debris flying through water-clogged city streets.

The storm was downgraded to a Category 1 on the hurricane intensity scale at 8 a.m. CMT (9 a.m. EDT) carrying top sustained winds near 90 mph and moving north, but officials said it was too soon to assess the damage.

Texas officials were waiting for a break in the weather to deploy a search and rescue operation.

“We expected a major storm and our expectations unfortunately came true,” said Mark Miner, a spokesman for Texas Gov. Rick Perry. “The weather needs to clear up a little bit to see just what the devastation was.”

The hurricane has shut down 17 oil refineries on the Gulf of Mexico, the heart of the U.S. oil sector where 22 percent of fuel supplies are processed. Energy experts said it would take at least a week for the refineries to get back to normal.

Houston was dark Saturday morning except for downtown and the Texas Medical Center, which are fed by underground power sources, Floyd LeBlanc of CenterPoint Energy said in an e-mail. Nearly all 2 million customers, or 4.5 million people, in the Houston-Galveston area were without power, he said.

“This is a huge storm that is causing a lot of damage, not only in Texas, but also in parts of Louisiana,” U.S. President George W. Bush on Saturday.

He said the government would monitor gas prices to prevent extraordinary price increases because of Ike.

Source: Reuters

HOUSTON —  A sprawling and strengthening Hurricane Ike steamed through the Gulf of Mexico on Friday on a track toward the nation’s fourth-largest city, where authorities told residents to brace rather than flee.Ike’s eye was forecast to strike somewhere near Galveston late Friday, but the massive system was already buffeting Texas and Louisiana.

The National Weather Service warned residents of smaller structures on Galveston they could “face certain death” if they ignored an order to evacuate; most had complied.

Evacuation orders also were in effect for low-lying sections of the Houston area. Authorities urged homeowners to board up windows, clear the decks of furniture and stock up on drinking water and nonperishable food.

The Coast Guard scrambled to respond to a pre-dawn distress call about a 584-foot bulk freighter with 22 people aboard that broke down in the path of the storm about 90 miles southeast of Galveston.

The Category 2 storm with its 105-mph winds could cause 50-foot waves and made rescue by ship impossible, Petty Officer Patrick Kelley said.

“They’re so far offshore, you’re looking at only helicopter responses. Then you’re dealing with winds,” Kelley said, adding that the Coast Guard was weighing its response options.

Kelley did not provide the name of the ship, which was hauling petroleum coke, or details on where it was headed.

Officials said residents should not flock to the roadways en masse, creating the same kind of gridlock that cost lives — and a little political capital — when Hurricane Rita threatened Houston in 2005.

“It will be, in candor, something that people will be scared of,” Houston Mayor Bill White warned. “A number of people in this community have not experienced the magnitude of these winds.”

The decision is a stark contrast to how emergency management officials responded to Hurricane Rita in 2005. As the storm closed in three years ago, the region implemented its plan: Evacuate the 2 million people in the coastal communities first, past the metropolis of Houston; once they were out of harm’s way, Houston would follow in an orderly fashion.

But three days before landfall, Rita bloomed into a Category 5 and tracked toward the city. City and Harris County officials told Houstonians to hit the road, even while the population of Galveston Island was still clogging the freeways. It was a decision that proved tragic: 110 people died during the effort, making the evacuation more deadly than the eventual Category 4 storm, which killed nine.

With the lessons of that disaster, public officials were left with a vexing choice this time. Because Ike’s path wasn’t clear until just about 48 hours before the storm, officials didn’t have a lot of time to make evacuation calls.

“Almost all of them are in a pretty tough spot,” said Michael Lindell, a Texas A&M University urban planner and emergency management expert. “The problem is elected officials were not elected to be hurricane experts.

“It’s staring into the barrel of a gun. It’s a very challenging problem for them and there isn’t any easy answer.”

Ike was forecast to make landfall early Saturday southwest of Galveston, a barrier island and beach town about 50 miles southeast of downtown Houston and scene of the nation’s deadliest hurricane, the great storm of 1900 that left at least 6,000 dead.

Though Houston didn’t evacuate, low-lying communities predicted to be the bulls-eye of the storm did. People on the island were ordered evacuated Thursday, joining residents of at least nine zip codes in flood-prone areas of Harris County, in which Houston is located, along with hundreds of thousands of fellow Texans in counties up and down the coastline.

“I don’t have a crystal ball, but if I did, I think it would tell me a sad story,” said Randy Smith, the police chief and a waterfront property owner on Surfside Beach, just down the coast from Galveston and a possible landfall target.

“And that story would be that we’re faced with devastation of a catastrophic range. I think we’re going to see a storm like most of us haven’t seen.”

Most metropolitan residents appeared to be heeding orders and staying put. Edgar Ortiz, a 55-year-old maintenance worker from east Houston, said leaders were providing wise advice, considering what happened during Rita, but said people were inclined to make up their own minds.

“I guess people tend to want to stay where they’re at,” he said as he shopped for bottled water, toilet paper and canned goods. “A lot of people don’t want to leave. I don’t want to leave. You may be taking a risk, but that’s just how it is.”

Maria Belmonte, 42, of Channelview, said she was stuck in traffic for 18 hours as she evacuated for Rita. This time, she was comfortable with the recommendation to stay put — but she said she would reconsider if the forecast worsened Friday.

“We have small kids, and we need to think about their safety,” said Belmonte, a records clerk at an elementary school.

Ike would be the first major hurricane to hit a U.S. metropolitan area since Katrina devastated New Orleans three years ago. For Houston, it would be the first major hurricane since Alicia in August 1983 came ashore on Galveston Island, killing 21 people and causing $2 billion in damage.

Ike is so big, it could inflict a punishing blow even in those areas that do not get a direct hit. Forecasters warned because of Ike’s size and the shallow Texas coastal waters, it could produce a surge, or wall of water, 20 feet high, and waves of perhaps 50 feet. It could also dump 10 inches or more of rain.

At 8 a.m. EDT Friday, the storm was centered about 230 miles southeast of Galveston, moving to the west-northwest near 13 mph. Ike was a Category 2 storm with maximum sustained winds near 105 mph.

Hurricane warnings were in effect over a 400-mile stretch of coastline from south of Corpus Christi to Morgan City, La., and many residents who fled Hurricane Gustav two weeks ago only to be spared in East Texas were packing up again Thursday.

Tropical storm warnings extended south almost to the Mexican border and east to the Mississippi-Alabama line, including New Orleans.

The oil and gas industry was closely watching the storm because it was headed straight for the nation’s biggest complex of refineries and petrochemical plants. The upper Texas coast accounts for one-fifth of U.S. refining capacity.

The first rain and wind was set to arrive later Friday. Residents were scurrying to get ready, and hardware stores put limits on the number of gas containers that could be sold. Batteries, drinking water and other storm supplies were running low, and grocery stores were getting set to close. Houston was slowly shutting down, and people beginning to head inside. The only thing to do was wait and see what Ike had in store.

“It’s a big storm,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry said. “I cannot overemphasize the danger that is facing us. It’s going to do some substantial damage. It’s going to knock out power. It’s going to cause massive flooding.”

Source: Fox News